This post will be a very simple one, but that can help you get rid of some of those tedious tasks that we all at some point had to do: send reminder emails to users about a specific task, project, business process, etc…
This is all about automating your work as much as possible. You should always think: if I’m doing the same thing periodically, there is a way to automate it!
And that’s where Power Automate comes into action!
I will show you different ways to send reminders to users with a bot message on Microsoft Teams and also by email.
key words: Power BI, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams, Outlook
This is how a Flow to send a reminder at the last day of each month looks like:
1) Open Power Automate and click on Create and Scheduled Flow:
2) Give your Flow a name and set it up to run every day. After that click on Create:
3) Add a Control step to your Flow of the type Condition:
4) On the condition fields add the following formulas:
The formula (1) the correspondent day of month for today (e.g. if today is 29/06/2020 this formula will retrieve 29) whilst the formula (2) is getting tomorrow’s correspondent day of the month (e.g. if today is 29/06/2020 then this formula will retrieve 30).
With this condition we guarantee that this flow will only run if we are in the last day of the month, as it’s the only situation where tomorrow’s day of the month will be lower than today’s day of the month (e.g. if today is 30/06/2020, formula (1) will retrieve 30 whilst formula (2) will retrieve 1, making the condition valid for the “If Yes” step).
5) The next step is to define what our flow will do when this condition is true.
In our case, we want our Flow to send a reminder as a bit on Microsoft Teams and also an email to the defined users.
To set up the Teams notification add the step Post a message as the Flow bot to a user:
We just need a headline and the recipient of this reminder. We can also set up a personalised message for the user.
The message the user will receive will look like this:
The Send an Email step will be the last one we will apply to our Flow:
6) Finally, we just have to save and test our flow:
Send a reminder every month, 3 days before the end of the month
Replace the condition by:
(1) dayOfMonth(addDays(utcNow(),0))
(2) dayOfMonth(addDays(utcNow(),3))
Send a reminder every month, on the 3rd day of the month
Replace the condition by:
(1) dayOfMonth(addDays(utcNow(),0))
Comments