Power Automate Tutorial: Save Email Attachment to OneDrive

TRANSCRIPT

Stefano Walker: Hi, everyone, Stefano Walker, here from WBM Marketing. I’m back with Sasha Weiman from our technology experience and enablement team. Today, we’re talking about Power Automate. Power Automate is an application within the Microsoft O365 Suite designed to help streamline and automate manual workflows by literally connecting our apps and common tasks together automatically. Sasha, please walk us through how to use this app, and give us an example of how Power Automate can make us more efficient in the way we work.

Sasha Weiman: Perfect, so I’m on the office.com landing page. My organization has given me access to Power Automate, so I can see the button here. If you do not see the button, you can reach out to your IT admin and talk to them about what you would like to do. They have some security and licensing considerations that they have to think about in order to enable this for the users.

If you see this Power Automate button, what you can do is you can click on it. It’s going to take you to the Power Automate homepage. I can see that I’ve got a few videos here where I can take some minimal training on it. It’s recommending some templates for me here. What I want to walk you through is just the creation of a very simple power automation.

I get a lot of emails with attachments to them. I want them to save automatically to my OneDrive folder for me. I don’t want to have to click them and hit, save to, or drag and drop them onto my desktop in order to print them, or anything like that. I want them just to – as soon as I get an email, I want it just to feed into my OneDrive for Business folder. Along the side here, you see I’ve got My Flows, Create, there’s some templates. I want to go into templates.

You’re going to see you get this whole stack of things. We’ve got all of the flows available to you that have been created by Microsoft and other users. You’ve got some featured, ones that have been shared with me, you’ve got approval flows, you’ve got email flows. What I want to do is I want to look for an Office 365 email attachment to OneDrive for Business. You can see this pops up for me right away. It is a very popular flow with individuals.

All I have to do is click into it. It gives you a brief overview of what it does. It wants to connect to your outlook account. It wants to connect to your OneDrive for Business account. If I see two checkmarks there, I know that’s good. If you saw no connection, you might have to hit a plus mark and just sign in again to your Office 365 account. I want to just go ahead and create this flow.

What I get here is the homepage of the flow I’m creating. I can see who owns the flow. I can see the connections. I can see the details. I see when it was created and modified by. I see that it’s automated, which just means that it runs automatically. I don’t even have to think about it. I want to do a couple of different things with it. I want to edit it.

Here’s the trigger action of the flow. On a new email to my inbox, I want it to do this with a specific person, so Stef, anything that I receive from you. I’m going to enter your email address in here. This flow is going to look at anything you send me with an attachment in it. It includes attachment, yes. It has an attachment, yes. It’s going to apply a couple of different things in the flow.

What it’s going to do first and foremost is it’s going to create a OneDrive folder for you called Email Attachments from Flow. Then it’s going to create a copy of the file you sent in Outlook. It’s going to save it into that folder for me. If I hit save here, it’s saving the flow. Then I can test. I’m going to hit test here. I’m just going to say I’ll perform the trigger action, which would be you sending me the email with an attachment.

We’re going to run a test. I’ll wait for you to send the email to me. You can see that I received the email with an attachment. Now, what I can do is I can navigate to my OneDrive. There is an automatic folder here called Email Attachments from Flow. If I go into that, you can now see that it’s pulled the attachments. It pulled his signature. It also pulled that invoice that I wanted from the email. Now, I don’t have to. I can just go. I can look at his email. I can reply. Then I can just move it and file it away. I don’t need to think about it anymore. I don’t need to click on the attachment and save it to my desktop or a specified place.

That’s what’s really great about Power Automate. You can create really simple flows like that. As we gain more skill, you can start to create your own automated flows. Maybe you want to save to a specific folder in your OneDrive, you could create a flow that does that. Maybe there are templates that you wanted to do where you wanted to automatically create a page in OneNote, or have Outlook emails automatically create tasks. That’s all possible with Power Automate.

Stefano Walker: All right, thanks again, Sasha, for that quick tutorial. Now you know a little more about how to use some of the powerful apps within Microsoft O365 Suite to make you more efficient and productive. Contact us today, and let’s have a conversation. We’ll align your business with experts, like Sasha, who can help bring the modern workplace to your office.

Sasha Weiman

Sasha works as a Solutions Consultant and Office 365 Service Adoption Specialist on WBM’s End User Experience team. Having started out in Customer Care at WBM, she is passionate about working with users to understand how they work and what technical resources they feel could better enable them. She works closely with our clients to plan out the deployment of technical tools that users will not only adopt, but also continue to use to drive the organization forward into a more modern and mobile workplace.