I haven’t written a ‘technical’ blog post in some time and I had this one in my queue for a couple of months so now that I have some free time again, I figured I’d circle back to this one. Back in October 2022, during Microsoft Ignite, we saw the introduction of a new template to Power Automate. I will describe it a little here and at the end, I’ll provide some thoughts an opinions about it.
What is it?
The new ‘Describe it to design it (preview)’ template is an AI driven template that uses natural language processing to take your description of what you want to build, and then it will create your flow with your connectors added and actions laid out. After you select your template, you’re greeted with the following screenshot. On the left of the screenshot, you can see that it’s going to walk you through the process of building a cloud flow “with your own words.” In the center of the page, you are given a text box as well as 3 examples of sentences you can use to build a cloud flow. In the text box, you can just begin typing your flows description.
A clear and concise description works best but whenever I demo this feature, I always choose something complex to demonstrate what works and what doesn’t. This time won’t be any different. The description that I’ll use in this example is:
“Every morning at 1am eastern, check every item in a SharePoint list where the Color field is equal to ‘Red’ and send my manager an email containing a table consisting of the Item’s Title, ID, and url”
As you type your description, you’ll see suggestions appear just below the textbox. You can either select one of those suggestions or click the arrow to the right of the textbox. Take note that the suggestions are clear and concise. As I mentioned, this will work best when the description isn’t overly complicated like my example.
After making your selection, you will be presented with a suggested flow. As you can see in this example, the Recurrence trigger was suggested because we mentioned “Every morning” in our description. Next, you’ll see the suggested actions. We said we wanted to “check every item in a SharePoint list” so the Get items action and a Foreach are present. We also said “send my manager and email” in the description so it suggested Get Manager, Get My Profile, and Send an Email as relevant actions. The description also says that we want to check when the “Color field is equal to ‘Red'” which caused it to suggest Condition.
Assuming that the trigger and actions align with what you are planning to build, you can hit the next button to go to Step 2 and start reviewing the connections. If the connection isn’t already configured, you may be prompted to provide credentials here.
After you hit next in Step 2, the last step, Step 3, is to configure your actions by specifying the SharePoint URL, which list you want to check against, and any other relevant information that it asks for. This information can be configured later so you don’t need to get it right the first time. Click the Create Flow button when ready.
In our scenario here, the end result is as follows. As you can see, it was automatically setup to run once per day as we wanted but the time wasn’t set for us so we’ll need to enter that information. If you specified a manager in step 3, then the manager will appear below but I left it blank so you can see that it’s flagging the manager UPN as required. I can easily select that manager UPN from the previous “Get my profile” action.
The foreach section is not as great in our example. What we originally asked was that a single email be sent to the manager once a day containing a table of items where the Color field equaled Red. Instead, the flow is looping through each item in the list, the condition wasn’t set, and if we manually set the condition and allow it to run, the manager would get an email anytime the condition is met. Overall, a pretty good start but not perfect.
My Thoughts
First, I want to talk about the template and how it’s presented in the first image of this blog post. My initial reaction is that it’s odd that it’s called out as it’s own item; however, the template is essentially a “wizard” of sorts that allows you to build a variety of flows and not just scheduled flows like we did here.
I think those who are new to Power Automate will benefit from this tool because, if used properly, can help reduce some of that up front knowledge that you need to gain before you can get started. For example, someone new to Power Automate may not be familiar with all the necessary connectors and actions, and this template can just figure it out based on the description. On the flip side, this template can be a crutch that people use to avoid making the effort of learning the different connectors and actions but it’s nearly impossible to not figure it out.
What about the proficient Power Platform professional? How’s that for alliteration? For this person, the feature is a time saver. Sometimes we build large flows with many connections and if you can properly describe what you need and have it set it all up, even if the flow isn’t correct like in this example, reorganizing the flow is quicker than starting from scratch.
Finally, one thing that I think would be great to see is an in-flow feature that allows us to describe certain sections of the flow rather than the entire flow. I think it would be cool to be able to describe what a condition should do and have it build all the actions inside of it for the Yes and No sides.
So, what do you think about this feature? Is it something you are using or would use? What features would you like to see it have?
SharePoint Lessons 