Automate tasks and get notifications with Microsoft Flow, an IFTTT look-alike

Microsoft Flow is a service that automates repetitive tasks, performs actions automatically, and creates notifications from various triggers. It is a similar service to If This Then That.

Who is Microsoft flow for?

Anyone can use Flow provided you have a Microsoft account, such as OneDrive, Outlook, Windows 10 and so on. All Microsoft services use a single sign in, so if you have access to one, you have access to them all.

Flow is mainly aimed at people that have a subscription to Office 365, however, some features work even if you don’t and the example below does not require a subscription. Anyone can use it.

What does Flow do?

Flow consists of a trigger and an action, which is very similar to the way If This Then That works. Here is example:

If an Outlook email has an attachment Then save it to OneDrive

The trigger is an email arriving in your Outlook.com inbox and the action is to save the attachment to a folder on OneDrive.

Flow does not just work with Microsoft services and it can connect to external services, like Dropbox, Google Drive, Buffer, Benchmark Email, Basecamp, Blogger, Facebook, Google Tasks, MailChimp, Twitter and many more.

It is available on the web and there are also mobile apps. When used on mobile you can get push notifications or use the phone’s ability to work out your location, and so on.

Create an automated workflow with Flow

Let’s create a simple workflow to automatically perform a task. To get to Microsoft Flow, go to the OneDrive or Outlook website in a browser, click the Office 365 Apps Launcher button (it’s nine dots in a square grid) and click Flow.

After logging in (same email and password as OneDrive and Outlook), the Flow home page appears. Click Templates. It is possible to create workflows yourself, but if there is a ready-made template it is easier to use that. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of workflows, and a lot of them require an Office 365 subscription. However, I chose Copy files between OneDrive and Dropbox, which works for anyone and an Office subscription is not required.

After clicking the tile, the workflow appears and because it involves an external service, you must sign in to it and authorise access.

Once the connection is made to the external service and authorised, Dropbox in this case, click the Continue button.

The trigger and action are now displayed and when a file is created on OneDrive it is also created on Dropbox. Click the folder icon on the right to select the folders. I chose to copy files created in my OneDrive\Public folder to Dropbox\Public folder. They both happen to have the same name, but you can copy any folder to any folder.

That’s it. Save it and return to the My Flows tab on the website.

Here you can see that I have two workflows and one is switched on and the other is switched off. The pencil icon is used to edit the workflow if you need to change the parameters, fix problems if it is not working and so on.

Some features, like Analytics, are only available to Office subscribers, but the basic features work for everyone. Click a workflow.

It shows the workflow details, such as a description, your connections to external services, and the run history. You can see if it succeeded or failed.

Bugs and features

This workflow does not quite work like I expected and from the description I thought it would copy files added to the folder on OneDrive to the folder on Dropbox.

It does, but it seems to be triggered by creating an Office document on OneDrive. I used the free Word and Excel web apps at OneDrive and the documents moved to or created in the specified folder were copied to Dropbox. It is useful to sync documents, but this workflow is not a general file sync. Other files that were in the folder were not synced.

Workflows run on a timed schedule and it varies depending on the tasks. This OneDrive to Dropbox document syncing runs every 15 minutes for example.

At first the workflow failed but I managed to get it working. I’m not sure how though! One thing I did was to edit the workflow, click the advanced options and select Yes under Infer Content Type. Check for parameters in the trigger and action and make sure they are set correctly.

Update: After some more tweaking I changed the Yes to No under Infer Content Type above and it now copies other files, not just Office documents. It seems like Yes = copy only Office files, No = copy all files. It is working more like a sync tool now and any files added to the OneDrive folder are automatically copied to Dropbox.

Sometimes you just have to fiddle around with these workflows to get them just right.

There is a lot more to Microsoft Flow and I have barely scratched the surface here. It does some quite advanced functions and there is a large collection of workflows to explore.