Automate the Boring Stuff: Getting Started with Microsoft Power Automate

How many hours does your team spend each week copying data between spreadsheets, chasing approvals by email, or sending the same reminder again and again? Microsoft Power Automate can take over much of that work.

What is Power Automate?

Power Automate is Microsoft’s tool for building automated workflows, called “flows”. A flow connects the apps you already use, such as Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Forms and Excel, so that when one thing happens, other things follow automatically.

You don’t need to be a developer. Most flows are built with a visual, drag-and-drop editor, with minimal or no coding.

What can you automate?

Approvals: route expenses, leave requests or document sign-offs to the right person and track the outcome.
Notifications: get a Teams message when a form is submitted or a file changes.
Data collection: save email attachments to SharePoint, or send Microsoft Forms responses straight into a Power BI dashboard.
Reminders and follow-ups: send scheduled emails without anyone having to remember.
Repetitive desktop tasks: use robotic process automation (RPA) to handle manual, repeatable work on your PC.

Even a simple flow can save a few minutes a day, and across a team that adds up quickly.

Why train your team?

Learning on the job works, but structured training gets people building useful flows much faster. It also helps your team avoid common mistakes, such as poor error handling and flows that nobody can maintain.

Power Automate training with JBI

Our Power Automate training course group brings together several related courses, so you can choose the right level for each person in your team.

Power Automate: Beyond the Basics: for people who’ve completed an introduction and want to move on to solutions, approval flows and more advanced automation.
Forms, Cloud & Desktop Power Automate: covers Microsoft Forms, cloud flows and desktop RPA flows, starting from the foundations of the Power Platform.
Power Platform Deep Dive: goes wider, covering Power Automate alongside Dataverse for Teams, expressions and the admin centre.

Courses are available at our London centre, onsite at your offices, or with remote attendance.

Training tailored to your team

We can adapt a course to your own processes. For one UK county council, we built a tailor-made two-day course on Microsoft Forms and Power Automate. It taught staff to feed information from partner organisations and residents automatically into a Power BI dashboard.

Tips before you start

Start small. Automate one simple, repetitive task first and build from there.
Check your licences. Some connectors and features need premium licences.
Document your flows. Name them clearly and note who owns them.
Learn together. Teams that learn together share ideas and reuse each other’s flows.

Ready to get started?

Explore the full Power Automate course group to find the right course for your team, or get in touch to talk about a tailored session.