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Researching Power Automate

I was doing a bit of research today to see if I could utilize Microsoft’s Power Automate (or Power Flow?), but alas, no, it does not appear that I can – at least not in the fashion that I would like.

Here’s a couple of things I learned:

You can’t use Power Automate with regular Excel.

Unfortunately, the only Excel Power Automate will operate on is the online version. I explored the online Excel and found it to be rather weak, so the online version will be useless for me as I use Excel in a very power user fashion – I guess you could call it.

You can’t use Power Automate with Power BI.

I was trying to see if I could use Power Automate to automatically refresh my Power BI connection within the file, but no, not happening. I didn’t think I could because if you have Power BI service, you can set up a data “refresh” but Power BI service requires subscription of some sort.

Power BI looks like it is designed to be used with the cloud.

An example would be the online Excel rather than the Desktop App. I can’t manage files on my hard drive through Power Automate but it will work with OneDrive and possibly Dropbox.

Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.

The templates were of the nature that requires working with or getting responses from other people: updating your Team’s group when something happens, getting or tracking multiple approvals, doing something with emails (maybe sending it or storing it). There are some templates related to SharePoint, again a collaborative cloud tool.

The last block is the one with the most potential at this time but the kind of stuff I do does not lend that well with workflow automation – at least, not at this time. When I was at SAIC, I think my work situation would have been most amenable to using Power Automate. In addition to working with/managing a team of people, we also used SharePoint at the time. I wished SharePoint had been further along in its development at the time because I’ve seen some really neat features and that group of people would have been very open to the use of those features.

For my home use, I can’t think how I can use it at this time.

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