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The 5 best things about Power Automate Part six of a six-part series of blogs
A separate blog lists the 5 worst things about Power Automate; this more positive blog lists its 5 best features! The 5 best things about Power Automate 1 - The scope of Power Automate 2 - The concept and implementation of triggers 3 - Testing flows 4 - Consistency 5 - Waiting for approvals (this blog)

The 5 best things about Power Automate

Part six of a six-part series of blogs

A separate blog lists the 5 worst things about Power Automate; this more positive blog lists its 5 best features!

The 5 best things about Power Automate
1 - The scope of Power Automate
2 - The concept and implementation of triggers
3 - Testing flows
4 - Consistency
5 - Waiting for approvals (this blog)

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 October 2022

5 - Waiting for approvals

The way Power Automate flows manage approvals is clever - and useful. For example, here's a flow which will allow Wise Owls to submit requests for films to be shown at our (fictional!) weekly film club:

When someone adds a row to the SharePoint list, the flow will send approval requests to any nominated people, and execution will pause until they give the film their blessing (or reject it).

Here's what the task to send out approval email requests might look like:

You can specify (as here) that the first person to respond controls whether the request is approved, or insist that all the contacted people have to respond before the flow can proceed onto the next stage.

Typically you would then have a condition which takes a flow down different paths according to whether a request is approved or not:

You're not limited to yes/no questions; approval processes can have multiple choice questions, with a switch action controlling which path a flow follows.

Microsoft will wait for 30 days before cancelling a flow if no acceptance or rejection is received (although there is a way to extend even this).

Parts of this blog
The 5 best things about Power Automate 1 - The scope of Power Automate 2 - The concept and implementation of triggers 3 - Testing flows 4 - Consistency 5 - Waiting for approvals (this blog)