Power Automate, unexpectedly useful – Apparata

Are you an office worker, like more than half of all Dutch people? Then you spend a large part of the time repeating the same actions over and over. With Microsoft’s Power Automate you can streamline this and do your work much faster with the aim of eventually getting everything done. How does Power Automate work? A short introduction.

What is Power Automate?

As the name more or less says, Power Automate is a software package to perform repetitive tasks faster. You often work with different programs for these tasks.

For example: you make an overview of last week’s sales in Excel. To do this, you import it from the accounting software. You then create a report in MS Word that you send to your manager.

This is a task that recurs every week, so it’s a good candidate for automation with Power Automate.

How does the package work?

Power Automate is integrated into Microsoft Office. Do you already work with Microsoft Office365? Then you can get started right away (but you have to take out a subscription, of course. Business is business). You start by setting up a so-called flow. This is a chain of automated steps.

That flow is set in motion by an event, an event. For example, an email with a certain word in the title. But also business processes, things that happen in the cloud or, for example, on your website, can get the flow going. You can set which event exactly. The application then goes through various steps that you have devised. You can also set ready-made templates. You can do all this without programming knowledge. Although that knowledge is useful for real customization.

Of course, Microsoft has a whole stable of certified partners ready to help you, at a bargain price.

Cost per user, or per flow

Of course the cash register immediately starts ringing, Bill Gates has become one of the richest men in the world for a reason. Microsoft charges per user per month. Do you work alone? Then you pay around 13 euros per month to automate cloud apps, services and data via digital process automation (DPA). You can enter an unlimited number of streams. This variant is clearly aimed at the one person, for example a self-employed person or a single bookkeeper in a small company. There are more expensive subscriptions for larger companies.

Is it a useful package?

I saw several videos on Youtube with user cases such as scraping websites and handling orders. Do you have a type of business as described in Timothy Ferriss’ book The Four Hour Work Week? Then you will probably be very happy with this package. Especially since there are great opportunities to integrate ChatGPT (after all, under the control of Microsoft).