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How to Prevent Email Triggers from Firing in Power Automate

Last week, I wrote a blog post that explained how to configure an email trigger for multiple strings. In other words, kick off the Power Automate flow when an email arrives with “Bug” or “Change Request” in the subject. I posted it on LinkedIn, and someone responded with a comment that showed how the same settings can be used to prevent email triggers from firing, such as when people reply to or forward an email with your subject filter. I love this use case, so I thought I’d explain it in its own post. Read on to learn more.

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How To Grab the File Extension of an Email Attachment

I’ve been working with email triggers a lot lately. Most of my use cases involve grabbing attachments from email and saving them on a shared drive. This is simple and easy to do, but….what you might not know about Power Automate is that it interprets any image in an email as an attachment. And, to avoid processing unnecessary files, the cloud flow should include a condition that looks at the file extension. So, how do you grab the file extension of an email attachment? It’s easy. Read on to find out.

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How To Build Power Automate Email Triggers With Multiple Strings

Our Automation team uses Microsoft Azure DevOps to track work. I wanted to build a Power Automate flow to monitor the team inbox, look for the words “Bug” or “Change Request” in email subjects, and then create an ADO bug or change request work item. This requires configuring an email trigger for multiple strings, which is a bit tricky. If you’ve never done it before, read on to learn more about Power Automate email triggers.

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How to Fix the ‘Failed to Assume Control of Chrome’ Error in Power Automate Desktop

This week, I ran into a problem when I moved a solution from our DEV environment to QA. A PAD flow I was calling from Power Automate started failing with the error ‘Failed to Assume Control of Chrome’. When I ran only the desktop flow, it worked fine. When calling PAD from Power Automate, it didn’t work. Based on the reviews of the Power Automate extension in the Chrome store, this has recently become a common problem. Read on to find the solution that worked for me.

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How to Pull the Right Data from SharePoint Tools in Alteryx

Many of the automation solutions we build incorporate Alteryx with Power Automate and Power Automate desktop. In many cases, we read and write to and from SharePoint lists. However, as you might know, the ODATA query is pretty slow, and you can’t refine the query in Alteryx. This post explains how to attack these two problems to make sure you get the right data as quickly as possible. Read on to learn more about SharePoint tools in Alteryx.

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What Are Power Automate Solutions?

Learning Power Automate is a journey. First, you learn about dynamic content, triggers, and actions. Then, you build a few cloud flows. You’ll eventually reach a point when the process you are automating requires more than one trigger or the process needs to go thru a formal development cycle, moving thru multiple environments (QA, UAT, PRD). This is when you need to learn about Power Automate solutions. Read on to learn more.

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Make Finding the Name of Day or Month in Power Automate Easy!

Earlier this week, I wrote about working with date and time in Power Automate. I explained how to use 4 functions to return the month and year from the current date. But, the values come back as numbers. What if you want the name of the day of the week or the month, like Monday or January? Returning names in Power Automate takes different expressions and the use of arrays, but it’s easy! Read on to learn how and leave a comment explaining how you’ve used arrays in Power Automate.

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