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The 5 best things about Power Automate Part three of a six-part series of blogs
A separate blog lists the 5 worst things about Power Automate; this more positive blog lists its 5 best features! The 5 best things about Power Automate 1 - The scope of Power Automate 2 - The concept and implementation of triggers (this blog) 3 - Testing flows 4 - Consistency 5 - Waiting for approvals

The 5 best things about Power Automate

Part three of a six-part series of blogs

A separate blog lists the 5 worst things about Power Automate; this more positive blog lists its 5 best features!

The 5 best things about Power Automate
1 - The scope of Power Automate
2 - The concept and implementation of triggers (this blog)
3 - Testing flows
4 - Consistency
5 - Waiting for approvals

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 October 2022

2 - The concept and implementation of triggers

Here's a trigger:

When someone clicks on the button, an event happens which triggers a program to do something (in this case, probably add the person to the dating agency's membership list).

In Power Automate, it's astonishing that triggers can be almost anything:

A small sample of the sort of triggers you can create.

Let's take just a few examples to illustrate this. Here are the triggers that Teams supports:

So you can (for example) write a flow which will send you an email whenever a new message is added to a chat, or which will add a task to your online planner whenever a member is added to a team.

Here are the OneDrive triggers:

Want to know when someone's changed your file? Write a flow to react to the appropriate trigger.

Here are the SharePoint triggers:

You could, for example, add a task to an Excel worksheet whenever someone adds an item to a SharePoint list.

One more example - here are the Outlook triggers:

So you could write a set of rules to manage incoming email, for example.

One can only imagine the complexity of how this all links together across Microsoft's server farms, without compromising security.

Parts of this blog
The 5 best things about Power Automate 1 - The scope of Power Automate 2 - The concept and implementation of triggers (this blog) 3 - Testing flows 4 - Consistency 5 - Waiting for approvals