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Do you want the ability to send a form to people at Seattle University that allows them to sign up for an event/s and receive an instant calendar invite for their selection? Use this how-to page to set up an automated event registration process using Microsoft O365 Tools. You will need to use Outlook, Forms, Excel, and Power Automate. This article also describes an optional additional step to create a shared master registration list in a SharePoint site. Follow the how-to article steps below. |
Before you begin, please note this process is a productivity hack – it comes with some incredible time-saving benefits to significantly reduce the total time, eliminate most interruptions, and reduce potential for errors in that are inherent with manual event registration, ; and there are also some imperfections you will need to decide if they are worth having. Ideally this setup will cost some dedicated initial setup time in exchange for greater freedom the rest of the quarter as the automation handles adding new registrants to the calendar invite automatically when the form is submitted.
Imperfections include: the initial invitation form users receive will include “FW:” in the subject line because it is technically an automatically “forwarded” invitation, the initial invitation form users receive is hard-coded as the snapshot of the invitation at the time you create the automation, users on Outlook Desktop (not web app) may not have the accept/decline option when they first receive the invitation from within their email reading pane (but the event will still appear on their calendar and they can accept/decline from the calendar view).
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Go to Power Automate
Choose “+ create” then “Automated cloud flow”
Name your flow and choose the trigger “when a new response is submitted”, select “create”
Some bugs have been witnessed in the “new designer” mode of Power Automate. Turn this off in the upper right:
In the trigger step, select the form you created. The form title may appear in the drop down when you click into the empty field. If it does not, scroll to the bottom and select “enter custom value”. Enter the unique ID of your form. You can find your form ID by looking at the URL of your form. Copy the text after “id=”
Select “+ New Step”
Search for “get response details” and choose this action step. This step is almost always used when you have a form trigger, because this is the step which goes into the form submissions and retrieves the entered data.
For Form ID, follow step 5 above again. For Response ID you will use Dynamic Content. If the Dynamic Content box does not automatically appear to the right, open it with the small blue + sign. Select “Response Id”
Select “+ New Step”
Search for “get email” and select “get emails (V3)”
To be continued week of 3/18….
Section 4B: Setting up the Automation Steps
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