In this lecture, we’re going to look at using templates. What are templates? How can we find and use them? Templates are a really great way to get started quickly on your automation development. There are hundreds of templates already created that will do almost anything you want to do. You can start from a template and customize it to fit your needs. If it doesn't do everything you want, customize or repurpose it. 

You'll notice we can access templates from the home page right in the middle. 

We also have an option in the navigation menu on the left dedicated to templates and we can get a comprehensive list of all flow templates when we click on it. There are also different ways to find the template we need.

By category is one of those ways.

Within the templates, we can find things by categories. Categories are showing across the top of the screen and when we click on the ellipses menu, we see a couple more. 

Some categories that I have found useful are remote work, approval, and some of the most used templates being email templates. 

From this category, you're able to start up an automation that could save Office 365 email attachments to a specified OneDrive for Business folder which could be really helpful for a project email box where everyone is sending attachments of project files. I just helped a client that needed to move attachments for a shared invoice email account to a SharePoint list for the accounts payable staff to be able to see them, filter them, and sort them.

We can also find the right template by doing a search. When I search for the word “form”, you'll see that there's a lot of different templates including some type of form. Many of these begin with Microsoft forms, but as you scroll down, you'll see that they come from different vendors like Cognito for instance. Cognito offers wonderful integration with forms. 

When somebody fills out a form, we can have things go to a SharePoint list and then send an email to someone letting them know that it's been updated. We can then use that list to send out blog posts or other communication.

Sorting templates is also very helpful.

We have the option to sort our templates as well. By default, they come sorted by popularity, but we can change it to sort them by name, which puts them in alphabetical order, or by the date they were created which helps us to find some of the newer ones.

A template doesn’t always fit our process perfectly so we may need to do some Customizing and Repurposing.

If you want to have Power Automate do some of the work for you, pick a template and then open the template and change the items that you wish to change. In a search for SharePoint templates, I find one that sends an email when a SharePoint list is modified. I can open this template and put in my site and list information.  The subject and body content of the email are not really what I want to send, so I can change those things and then save it as my own.

So, using templates can be very helpful in starting with Power Automate. Not only can you learn from them, but you can customize them as well. We saw how we could find templates through categories, searches, and sorting. We also saw that we could customize and repurpose those templates to meet our needs, then save them as our own.

Our next lecture will cover Power Automate Connectors.