We’ve gone through a couple of instances of how we can use Power Automate, and we have discussed how to create Microsoft Lists. Today, we are going to put these together and create something that we can use in real life. We are going to create an issue tracker that is going to have a Power Automate flow attached that will send us (who will be in charge of the list) and the person who the ticket has been assigned to an email two days before the due date comes up.

Creating Our List

We have seen in the past how to create our lists, but this time, instead of starting a blank list, we are going to use a template that Microsoft has created called Issue tracker. To create this list, go into your Microsoft list application. From here, we are going to select “New list” and you will get the standard pop-up. Now, select “Issue tracker” from the templates.

It will give you a sample of what the list is going to look like, and we can just click “Use Template” to get our list going. From here, we will name our list, and make the icon any color, and little animal that we would like, and then click “Create”.

Now that our list is made, we are going to remove the “Issue source” and “Days old” columns, and add a due date column. To remove the columns, click on the drop-down, and select “Column settings”, and then selecting “Edit”.

At the bottom, you will see your “Delete” button, so go ahead and click that. To add our “Due date” column, we are going to click on the “Add Column” on the right, and select “Date and Time”.

Then just name the column “Due date”, and then you are good to go. We can now finally add our issues to this tracker. Simply click “New” in the top left and add your issues. Once it has been filled out, we have finished our first step.

Creating Our Power Automate Flow

Now it is time to create a flow that will let you and the person assigned to the issue know that the due date is coming up in two days. This will help you manage, and make sure that everyone is getting their warnings with enough time to resolve the issue. Here is one of the cooler parts of lists that I have seen, they have integrated Power Automate flows.

To create a reminder for your due date, all you need to do is click on "Automate" in the top bar, and select "Set a reminder", and "Due date".

It will go through a sign-in process to make sure you have access to everything that you will need (SharePoint, Notifications, and Office 365 users). If there are any issues, you will see a red exclamation point that you can click on, and it will help you resolve it. Once they are all green, click on "Continue".

You will be asked to name your flow, and how many days in advance you want your reminder to trigger. We are going to name it “Task is about to be due”, and set it for 2 days in advance of our due date.

Click "Create", and you have set your flow! But remember, we also want to send the email to the person that it is assigned to as well. So, we are going to have to go edit this flow. We need to go to our flows (flow.microsoft.com), to see that the flow is added. Simply hover over it and click on the Pencil icon to edit it. Your flow is going to look like this:

The things that we are going to need to change are in the "Scope to get items due in 1 day". Click on this to open it, and you are going to see a whole bunch of things. We only need to focus on the "Send me a reminder email".

We are going to delete this and compose our own email so that we can send it to multiple people. To delete it, click on the “…” and select “Delete”.

We are now going to set up our email. The first thing we are going to need to do is replace the reminder email, so simply click on "Add an action" button. We now need to find “Send an email (V2)“ in the operations menu.

From here, we are going to set our "To" field. We need to pull the dynamic content in here. Click into the field, and you will see the “Assigned to email” and “Created by email”.

Note: This will be only if you are the only one creating issues in this list.

Now, it's time to create our subject line. We want to make it as clear for everyone as we can, so let’s enter the title, and add “is due in 2 days”.

Finally, in the body of our email, we can simply add the item description to help if there is any confusion. Once that is all done, test your flow and make sure that it is good to go.

Automate Daily Tasks with Microsoft 365

This is just one small thing that you can do to help organize and automate your life using Microsoft 365, and they are all readily-available tools. Imagine using this same list and flow (with a few changes of course) to help you with project management, or maybe as a check-in for your staff that has to work alone.

There are so many different uses, and if you have any ideas, contact us here and Blueshift, and we would love to sit down and build it out with you!