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Automation Data Software

Transform your data in PowerAutomate

Super-charge your automations in PowerAutomate by customising the data coming into it using Power BI’s query editor…

If you have direct access to a database or via a Gateway, a powerful action within PowerAutomate is to use PowerQuery – the query editor found in Power BI and Excel – to edit that data and feed it into subsequent actions.

I’ve been using this to generate custom notifications from an I manage; so I can filter the data set, add conditional and custom columns, perform calculations, group data, pretty much every query step we can do in Power BI, we can do in PowerAutomate.

Once the transformation is configured, we can use the data generated to populate all sorts of actions after it – send emails or messages to Teams, Yammer, or Slack, populate a list in Sharepoint, generate a CSV file, run some machine learning across it, or post to a database using the HTTPS API action for instance.

For the moment, the action doesn’t support databases requiring Azure Active Directory authentication; something that’s been being worked on for some time I gather.

More guidance and use cases for this powerful action can be found in the release notes; and if you’re new to Power Query, check out the introduction from Microsoft.

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