Streamline Sharing Folder and Email Message using Power Automate ( Part 1, Folder Creation)

Here I will share one of my business case scenario using Power automate, Excel and OneDrive for a conference management that can be apply to all other training class scenarios.
we normally want to create a personalized folder for your students in class or for our speakers in a conference so they/we can put or files there and be separated environment from others. Or at the same time we want to send a specific email for each of the people based on their situation.

Of course writing codes in C# is one way, but there are other way without writing code is available for someone like me that did not write C# code for some years or event never right code.

Excel Part

The first step was to create the list, I create a online Excel File to store speakers name and email in table format excel file and I put it inside my OneDrive folder.

Then, I enable one Add on inside Excel online named Flow. To access it first click on the Insert tab, then in Office- Add-ins, navigate to Store and search for Microsoft Flow.

After enable the Flow Add-ins, you need to sing in to the Power Automate ( Microsoft Flow)

Now you ready to create your first flow section that is about creating a folder with name in the Excel sheet.

Flow Section

In the Microsoft Flow, you need to add a trigger so the flow and the process start.

The trigger for my flow is when a user select a row in the excel file. so if the end user select a/multiple row/s that contains the name, ID and the email of the speakers the trigger start.

For a selected row is my trigger. I need to specify the location of the Excel file in OneDrive as below and the Table name ( Make sure the data in the excel file are in Table format before)

In the next step, as we do not have and Action in Flow to create a folder, I follow the article by BUILDBOD.

So I create a temporary file with a folder name ( my desire name come from excel file), as the folder does not exist, so to create a temporary file, Power Automate, create a folder in that name, then I will delete the temporary file. As you can see in the below picture, Create file in OneDrive, the Folder Path is the desire folder, but I put the Name received from selected row in Excel ( Name of person in this example Leila Etaati). IN the next stage, a file with that Name also created, that in the next Action I delete it using Delete File in OneDrive.

That is all! for creating Folder. you can test is as below.

Next if you check your OneDrive you should see the folder has been created.

In next parts, I will show how to create a share link and how to send a customized nice message with images and personalized link to this created folder.

Leila Etaati

Trainer, Consultant, Mentor

Leila is the first Microsoft AI MVP in New Zealand and Australia, She has Ph.D. in Information System from the University Of Auckland. She is the Co-director and data scientist in RADACAD Company with more than 100 clients in around the world. She is the co-organizer of Microsoft Business Intelligence and Power BI Use group (meetup) in Auckland with more than 1200 members, She is the co-organizer of three main conferences in Auckland: SQL Saturday Auckland (2015 till now) with more than 400 registrations, Difinity (2017 till now) with more than 200 registrations and Global AI Bootcamp 2018. She is a Data Scientist, BI Consultant, Trainer, and Speaker. She is a well-known International Speakers to many conferences such as Microsoft ignite, SQL pass, Data Platform Summit, SQL Saturday, Power BI world Tour and so forth in Europe, USA, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. She has over ten years’ experience working with databases and software systems. She was involved in many large-scale projects for big-sized companies. She also AI and Data Platform Microsoft MVP. Leila is an active Technical Microsoft AI blogger for RADACAD.