Microsoft Flow is on a roll – with two really popular new features in the last 2 weeks, it’s great to see so much excitement around the tools.
Exciting Feature No. 1 – Copy and Paste
This has to be the most requested feature ever! I do not know a single Flow developer who has not at some point asked when this is coming, so seeing it launched over the weekend and live today in my tenancy was a real treat.
How it works – you now have a clipboard to use when adding actions so;
Step 1 – Copy
Step 2 – Paste (having switched from All to “My Clipboard”
This could not be any easier, but the time saving will be enormous – as you can see the full details from all fields come with it – so any complex emails or table layouts created once can be reused easily.
TIP – The best thing about this feature – and the one that made it worth the wait is that “My Clipboard” persists across Flows – so I can take my audit log update and add to other flows – genius! This is also super useful if you wrote some spot on actions and change your mind about the trigger – simply add the actions to the clipboard and start again (..so there is a little rework if you passed data from trigger but still a huge time save IMO)
Note: Pasted code clears each time you log out of Flow.
Exciting Feature No. 2 – New action for Item level permissions
Now this was always possible using rest but the introduction of it as a feature was way more popular than I thought it would be – a single post on this in LinkedIn saw the following stats all within a few days.
I guess this was more popular than I’d thought it would be, however its not surprising that the simplicity this brings to a common process is so widely appreciated.
This action is again exactly what it says on the tin – to demonstrate I simply changes the permissions on a document from this as the inherited default
Adding my new user (invoices)
Then after removing…
So – you may have expected that to reset inheritance, but that’s not what the actions does in its definition here
I think in the future reset to inheritance will come – at least I hope so.
Look out for videos on this one, I’d bet on a release soon on Jon Leveque’s You Tube channel – which you should already be following – if not go subscribe now 🙂
So, there you are two super cool new additions to the Flow platform that I can see and play with live today (I’m on preview release and am a UK tenancy) – thanks for the updates Microsoft.
