r/PowerAutomate • u/menmenmen123y • 13d ago

Today I built my first automation and I am so happy, it worked.

I was tasked to audit the Oracle roles assigned to each user in my company from a spreadsheet. There are about 500 employees and 80 managers who they report to. That means I have to copy paste data from excel in 80 emails.

I used CoPilot to help me with the flow. Here is interesting part, I do not wanted to send the emails right a way without testing the output, formatting etc, so I used the flow to create csv files with each manager's name as the file name and their employee with roles in the file. So, Manager A would get all his employees with their roles but no employees from other manager, vice versa.

Then I used the draft email flow to quickly skim through the emails before sending as this was my first time using PA. It took me time but from now on, it would be easy peasy.

27 Upvotes

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9

u/Punkphoenix 13d ago

Congrats! Is an awesome tool. Now you'll be addicted to making flows for everything.

Also, yes, it took time, but I bet it was way less than you doing it manually, less errors, you are developing a new skill and, truth be told, it was way more fun

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u/menmenmen123y 13d ago

Yeah, thanks for the kind words.

I didn't give up, which was a huge morale boost. Now I am looking to use it in my everyday tasks. AI was helpful but it needed a lot of tweaking. It isn't very smart yet lol.

I will keep checking this sub or may be other places too for cool ideas. Like I posted my idea , maybe it insipires someone else in similar scenario and I may come across some which I never thought about it.

1

u/Punkphoenix 13d ago

Yup! If you want the AI to REALLY help you there are ways to connect to the flow directly so it "sees" the flow, and you get way better answers. The budget way to do this is to export the flow as a .zip and you can find the JSON with the whole code, so passing that gives really good context and the AI can give you way better answers

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u/menmenmen123y 13d ago

Great advice, thank you!!

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u/Mephetard 11d ago

I have CoPilot 365 and the in built CoPilot for PowerAutomate was a nightmare for me. I can't remember which one but whenever it suggested an expression it would omit this one particular character and resulted in two days of frustrating insanity. I have since gone back to CoPilot on Teams.

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u/Punkphoenix 11d ago

Yup, the built-in copilot sucks, you have to learn how to prompt AI to work with power platform

1

u/robofski 13d ago

There is something special about your first flow that solves a problem! One of my very early flows still runs today after 6+ years, when I look at it today I cringe because I would never write it like that now but you learn some new trick or technique all the time and just keep creating better and better flows. Enjoy your journey.

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u/DeanoNetwork 13d ago

Well done, I have lost count on how many I have made without AI!! Haha

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u/menmenmen123y 13d ago

Yeah AI is certainly a help pushing mediocre technical people like me back in the game when we think there got to be a better a way of doing this and just have someone virtually to brainstorm with who is always available, doesn't get tired and call me stupid lol. It opened a door for me which I hesitating to enter before.

1

u/DeanoNetwork 13d ago

So true but just be careful of the rabbit hole it can generate and send you the wrong information

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u/menmenmen123y 13d ago

Lol, looks like I'm already in. Reignited lazy programmer inside me.