If you’ve ever found yourself copying information from one spreadsheet to another, chasing people for approvals in Teams, or manually updating trackers every Friday afternoon while questioning your life choices, then Power Automate might just become your new favourite Microsoft tool.
The good news is that you do not need to be a developer to use it.
In fact, some of the best Power Automate solutions come from people (like me) who simply got tired of doing repetitive tasks manually.
Recently, I created my own beginner-friendly approval flow using Microsoft Forms, Power Automate, Teams, and Excel. The flow starts when a user submits a Microsoft Form, automatically captures the response details, and sends an approval request to the relevant person.
Depending on the outcome, the flow can then post a message into Teams and log the approved request into an Excel table for tracking purposes. Building this flow was a brilliant introduction to how Power Automate handles triggers, approvals, conditions and automated actions, and it really highlighted how quickly repetitive manual processes can be streamlined with very little technical experience required.
And honestly? Once you build your first flow, you start spotting automation opportunities everywhere.
So, What Actually Is Power Automate?
Power Automate is Microsoft’s workflow automation platform that allows different apps and services to work together automatically.
Think of it as a digital assistant, similar to the likes of Copilot, that quietly handles repetitive admin tasks in the background while you get on with more important work.
You create a flow by defining:
- A trigger
- One or more actions
- Any conditions or decisions
For example:
- A form gets submitted
- An approval gets sent
- A Teams notification is posted
- Information gets added into Excel
All automatically, which means no endless email chains or manual labour required.
Why It’s Perfect for Beginners
One of the biggest myths around automation is that it requires coding knowledge, and it really doesn’t.
Power Automate is built with a visual drag-and-drop interface, which means you can create surprisingly useful workflows without writing a single line of code.
Most beginner flows follow a very simple structure:
When this happens > do this action > check a condition > do something else
That’s it. Once you understand that logic, everything starts to click into place.
The Flow Structure Explained
Looking at the flow I built, there are a few key components that every beginner should understand.
The Trigger
Every flow starts with a trigger.
In this case: “When a new response is submitted”
This tells Power Automate when the automation should begin.
Triggers can come from all sorts of places:
- Forms
- Emails
- Teams messages
- SharePoint updates
- Planner tasks
- Even social media activity
The trigger is essentially the starting gun for your automation.
Pulling Through the Information
After the trigger, the flow uses: “Get response details”
This step pulls all the information from the Microsoft Form into the flow so it can be used later.
Think of it as unpacking all the information your automation needs before it decides what to do with it.
Without this step, Power Automate would know a form was submitted… but not what was actually submitted.
Which would make approvals slightly awkward.
Creating an Approval
This is where things start feeling clever. The flow automatically sends an approval request to the relevant person, allowing them to approve or reject directly within Teams or Outlook.
Which means:
- No manual forwarding
- No “Just checking if you saw my email”
- No hunting through inboxes from three weeks ago
Approvals are one of the most popular Power Automate features because they instantly remove friction from internal processes.
Holiday requests, expenses, equipment requests, and marketing approvals – all of these can be streamlined incredibly quickly.
Using Conditions
Once the approval is completed, the flow checks the outcome using a condition.
If approved:
- A Teams message gets posted
- The information is added to Excel
If rejected:
- The flow follows a different path
This branching logic is one of the most important concepts in Power Automate.
You’re essentially teaching the workflow how to make simple decisions automatically.
And while it sounds technical, it is actually very visual and beginner-friendly once you see it in action.
Why Excel Still Matters
One thing many beginners love about Power Automate is that it works brilliantly with tools they already use every day. Excel is a perfect example.
In this flow, approved requests are automatically logged into an Excel table, creating an instant tracker without anyone needing to update it manually.
It’s simple, practical and genuinely useful.
A quick tip: Always format your Excel data as a proper table before connecting it to Power Automate.
This catches almost everyone out at least once. Usually, right before you confidently announce, “I’ve finished the flow.” You probably haven’t, and the table knows.
The Best Part About Learning Power Automate
The beauty of Power Automate is that small automations create big wins.
You do not need to build a huge enterprise solution on day one.
Even saving ten minutes a day adds up massively over time.
And once people see something working automatically, the ideas start flowing naturally:
- “Could this send reminders too?”
- “Could this update SharePoint?”
- “Could this notify Teams automatically?”
- “Could Copilot help build this?”
The answer is usually yes.
Final Thoughts
Power Automate can feel intimidating when you first open it, especially when you see complex flows online with dozens of actions and conditions.
But the reality is that most people start exactly the same way. With one simple process, they are tired of doing it manually.
That first flow is where everything starts. And once you realise you can automate approvals, notifications, tracking and admin tasks in under 15 minutes, it completely changes how you look at everyday work.
The dangerous part is that you will never look at a repetitive task the same way again.
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