Power Automate is a powerful cloud-based tool from Microsoft that enables users to automate workflows and repetitive tasks. It connects with a wide variety of applications, including SharePoint, Outlook, Excel, and CPQ. Power Automate allows you to create "flows"—automated sequences of actions triggered by events (e.g., a file upload or HTTP request).

Why Use Power Automate?

Streamline Repetitive Tasks: Automate daily business processes, reducing the time spent on manual operations.

Integrate Multiple Systems: Power Automate connects various services and applications, allowing for seamless data transfer between systems like SharePoint, CPQ, and Outlook.

Increase Productivity: By automating mundane tasks like sending emails, uploading files, and logging data, you can free up time for more important, strategic work.

Key Concepts

Flows: A flow is an automated process triggered by a specific event (like a file upload) and carries out one or more actions (such as sending an email or uploading a document to CPQ).

Triggers: Triggers start a flow. For example, a trigger could be a file being added to a SharePoint folder, or an HTTP request being received. In this tutorial, you will work with triggers such as manual triggers, HTTP requests, and file modifications.

Actions: Actions are the tasks that occur after the trigger is activated. In this series, you'll see actions such as uploading files to CPQ, sending emails, or writing data to an Excel file.

Connectors: Power Automate integrates with many apps and services through connectors. In these lessons, we’ll use connectors for SharePoint, Excel, and Outlook as well as SaaS solutions with a rest-API (like Tacton CPQ).

What You Need to Know Before Starting

Basic Understanding of SharePoint: Knowing how files are stored and retrieved from SharePoint will help you understand how the flows interact with documents in your system.

Familiarity with Tacton CPQ: Understanding how to work with CPQ endpoints will be useful for configuring the upload and document retrieval steps. We will guide you thought the steps.

Basic Knowledge of HTTP Requests: In some lessons, we’ll use HTTP actions to interact with APIs, so understanding the basics of GET and POST requests will be helpful.

Experience with Excel: In one lesson, you’ll be logging data into an Excel table, so being comfortable with Excel and its basic features will help.