Hello Citizen Developers!

I get more and more questions about Power Automate. One of the recent questions is about how to look up a person field from SharePoint using Power Automate. I’ll give you a bit of the background in a second. Power Automate is really awesome for citizen developers. There are a lot of triggers and actions that are easy to understand and use, such as send email, create a list item in Sharepoint etc. But there are also techier, nerdier actions that are less citizen developer friendly. One of them is Send an HTTP Request to SharePoint. It might be the answer to many challenges, intimidating at first, but powerful and, hopefully, not so complicated once you’ve tried it. This post is about this very action and how you can use it to simplify your flow.

News in SharePoint are great, it is easy to edit and post news, add pictures and web parts. But you might have thought how you would spread the word better. If your workmates would check the start page on your site or on the SharePoint Home every day, it would be awesome, it might be the case in future. In the meantime though, you probably have considered sending out email notifications to your workmates whenever there is fresh news.

Honestly, Power Automate is great for automating repetetive stuff. But I think there is room for one-time flows as well. I’ll give you an example.

I’ve got an excel file with quite a few rows. And I need to convert it to a SharePoint List. I know there is a couple of options, such as Quick Edit in Classic View, Import an Excel file as a list (it also requires the classic view), there will be Excel import in Modern as well. But I need to also change the column names, maybe adjust something “on-the-go”.