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Power Automate, Microsoft's workflow automation platform, allows you to automate repetitive tasks, streamline processes, and reclaim valuable time. Let's explore a daily task that you can automate for a more productive workday: creating tasks from emails.
Pain Point: Are you constantly receiving emails that require follow-up actions or tasks? Manually creating tasks for each email can be tedious and prone to oversight.
Automation Solution: Create a simple Power Automate flow that triggers when a new email arrives. It then automatically creates a corresponding task in Microsoft To Do, ensuring important emails translate into actionable tasks.
Step 1: Access Power Automate
- Navigate to the Power Automate website or access it through your Microsoft 365 applications.
Step 2: Create a New Flow
- Click on "Create" and choose "Automated cloud flow".
- Provide a name for your flow, like "Email to Task".
Step 3: Set the Trigger
- Under "Choose your flow's trigger," search for and select "When a new email arrives (V3)".
Step 4: Define Conditions (Optional)
- If you want to create tasks only for specific emails, click on "New step" and add a "Condition" control.
- Configure the condition based on your criteria, like:
- Sender's email address: "is equal to" a specific email.
- Subject line: "contains" certain keywords.
- Importance: "is equal to" "High".
Step 5: Add the Action
- Click on "New step" and search for "Create a task".
- Select the appropriate task management tool you use (e.g., Microsoft To Do, Planner).
- Fill in the task details:
- Title: Dynamically populate it using the email's subject line.
- Due date: Set a specific date or use expressions to extract dates from the email body if available.
- Notes: Include additional information from the email or add a link back to the original email for easy reference.
Step 6: Save and Test
- Click "Save" to save your flow.
- Send yourself a test email that meets the defined conditions and verify if a task is created automatically.
Additional Tips
- Explore Advanced Options: Power Automate provides numerous other actions and conditions to customize your flow further. You can extract specific data from emails, assign tasks to different people, or send notifications upon task creation.
- Error Handling: Consider adding error handling steps to your flow to gracefully manage situations where task creation might fail (e.g., due connectivity issues or invalid data).
Productivity Boost: This automation ensures that actionable emails don't slip through the cracks. It streamlines task creation, saving you time and helping you stay organized and on top of your work.
Accelebrate offers customized Power Automate courses to boost your team's productivity. Learn to build automated workflows without coding, integrating with popular Microsoft tools, including Outlook, SharePoint, Planner, To Do, and more. Our expert instructors use hands-on exercises and real-world examples in live, interactive classes, either at your location or online.
Written by: Greg Lutes
