With so much communication going on, it’s no wonder that many people struggle to find uninterrupted focus time during the workday. In fact, 68% of people say they don’t have enough time to concentrate on their most important tasks.

If you are one of them, then you will love the three new Power Automate templates that we have created. These templates are designed to help you streamline your calendar and reduce email distractions by using the power of Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and To Do. They are easy to set up and customize, and they will run in the background to help you focus on your critical tasks and save time.

Let’s take a look at each of these templates and see how they can benefit you.

Be notified of key emails

Tired of jumping to Outlook to check if an email has come through? “Be notified of key emails” will alert you in Teams when you receive key emails that match the criteria you have defined. You can set your keywords, add any key contacts you would like to track emails from. The automation will run every 30 minutes and notify you in Teams if any emails have been received that meet your set criteria.

Get this flow

Flag important emails

This template will flag your important emails automatically as they arrive in your inbox. You can set your desired keywords that would appear in the subject line and or key contacts you would like to flag emails from. Once set, emails that match your criteria will be flagged for your attention automatically. This way, you can easily sort your inbox by flagged emails and see your most important emails first.

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Turn emails into to-do items

Do you ever lose track of action items that come through the constant barrage of emails? Well, this template will convert your emails into to-do items automatically and add them to your To Do list. You can set your keywords and any key contact you would like emails to be converted to to-dos. Say goodbye to lost action items within your inbox and hello to peace of mind with up-to-date To Do items.

Get this flow

We hope you find these Power Automate templates useful and that they help you streamline your calendar and reduce email distractions. As always we’d love to hear from you, so comment below and visit our Power Automate ideas forum to upvote or ideas for templates that you would find useful.

The post How to Streamline Your Calendar and Reduce Email Distractions with Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this series of posts, we wanted to highlight some popular templates that can supercharge your productivity by helping you stay on top of things like messages, emails, and meetings. To begin with we wanted to focus on some of our favorite calendar management templates.

Calendar management is an essential skill for anyone who wants to stay organized and productive. However, it can also be a source of stress and frustration if you have to deal with multiple calendars, conflicting appointments, or unclear agendas. Fortunately, Power Automate has some templates that can help you with these challenges. Here are some examples of how you can use Power Automate templates to manage your calendar more effectively:

Use a flow to find a meeting time with a message sender in Teams

Want to find a time to quickly meet up with a colleague or setup a 1 hour brainstorm? Well with this template you can kick off a flow directly from the person’s Teams message, the flow finds the best available time for you to meet based on your respective calendars and schedules a meeting.

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Auto-remove cancelled meetings and notify me in Teams

This template automatically removes cancelled meetings from your calendar and notifies you in teams when it removes cancelled meetings. The flow runs every thirty minutes and ensures that your calendar is always up to date and clean by removing cancelled meetings and notifying you in Teams.

Get this flow

Automatically prompt users to set an agenda for a meeting

Have you ever attended a meeting without knowing what it was about? Or have you ever hosted a meeting without having a clear agenda?

With this template, you can ensure that every meeting has a purpose and a plan by automatically prompting for an agenda before the meeting starts. This template will send an email reminder to the organizer of any Outlook event that does not have an agenda in the body.

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Notify your next meeting that you’re running late

Caught up in the Monday (or Wednesday the new Monday) traffic? Or have your earlier meeting running long and want to notify your next meeting? This flow sends you a Teams message ahead of meeting and checks if you want to send a running late message to that meeting chat. You can either directly use the message that’s prepopulated or edit it inline in the teams card.

Get this flow

These are just a few amazing templates that you can use to be more productive. As always we’d love to hear from you, so comment below and visit our Power Automate ideas forum to upvote or ideas for templates that you would find useful.

The post Maximizing Your Productivity with Power Automate: Automating your calendar. appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

I started from the basic template linked above, so I won’t focus too much on the trigger and actions to save the event. For now, I want to implement the following criteria for syncing the event between calendars:

• The subject contains “MSSL” (Microsoft Soccer League!). I always want my soccer games sent to my personal calendar.
• The event starts at or before 10am
• The event starts at or after 5pm
• The body of the event contains a special identifier (“@@HOME”) that I can use to force an event to be synced even if it doesn’t match any of the other criteria.

To start, the events come through the Office 365 connector in the UTC timezone, but I want to reference them in my local time zone. I will use the “Convert time zone” action to do this. (This action is documented in more detail here). Because my criteria above only cares about the time of the event, I will use a custom format string “HHmm” to output the hour and minute of the start time in a form that can be parsed by int(). For example, an event starting at 6:30pm would be output as 1830. 

The basic “Condition” designer card only supports a single condition, not a complex AND or OR. In order to combine our above criteria, we will need to switch it into Advanced mode to enter a full WDL expression. Instead of authoring the full condition expression by hand, I’ll add each individual criteria as its own condition, and then use the Advanced editor to copy the expressions out. The condition branches don’t need to be hooked up to anything yet, since I will remove them once extracting the expressions. Here’s the condition I added for one of the time checks:

And here’s the advanced editor view of the same Condition:

We end up with the following expressions after adding all conditions and copying out of the advanced mode:

• @contains(triggerBody()?['Body'], '@@HOME')
• @contains(triggerBody()?['Subject'], 'MSSL')
• @lessOrEquals(int(body('Convert_time_zone')), 1000)
• @greaterOrEquals(int(body('Convert_time_zone')), 1700)

We’ll use the WDL or() function to combine these expressions. This function takes two expressions, and returns true if either or both are true. We’ll need to nest the expressions through multiple or()s since we have more than two expressions. Note that only the outer or() needs to be prefixed with the @ character.

@or(
    contains(triggerBody()?['Body'], '@@HOME'),
    or(
        contains(triggerBody()?['Subject'], 'MSSL'),
        or(
            lessOrEquals(int(body('Convert_time_zone')), 1000),
            greaterOrEquals(int(body('Convert_time_zone')), 1700)
        )
    )
)

Note: I’ve written it across multiple lines for readability and easier matching of parenthesis, but it will ultimately need to be entered in without line breaks like so:

@or(contains(triggerBody()?['Body'], '@@HOME'), or(contains(triggerBody()?['Subject'], 'MSSL'), or(lessOrEquals(int(body('Convert_time_zone')), 1000), greaterOrEquals(int(body('Convert_time_zone')), 1700))))

On the “If yes” branch of the single condition, I’ll use the Create an event action to sync the event to my personal calendar. Because I have a similar Flow set up to sync personal events to my work calendar, I need to take some extra steps to avoid an infinite loop caused by one Flow creating an event on a calendar that triggers a different Flow, syncing it back and forth. To do this I’ll add a special string in the body of the new event: Synced with Flow! 

I’ve added another condition right after the trigger to skip any event that contains that string. I could embed this with an and() around the existing expression that we created above, but I’ll show another technique — using the Terminate action to stop a Flow run. By using Terminate in the “If yes” branch, I don’t need to embed the remainder of the flow inside the “If no” branch. This technique can be used to keep the level of nested conditions to a reasonable level. 

That’s all it takes! With complex expressions and the Terminate action, you can reduce the number of redundant actions, simplify conditions, and eliminate levels of actions nested below the Yes/No branches of Conditions. 

The post Advanced | Flow of the Week: Selective calendar event sync using Condition advanced editor mode and Boolean expressions appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.