BYU Student Author: @Kaden_Sandberg
Reviewers: @Kiya_Smith @Jason_Nguyen
Estimated Time to Solve: 20 Minutes
We provide the solution to this challenge using:
- Power Automate
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Overview
You’ve recently submitted the final details for your Big Four Beans internship application—congratulations! Now, all that’s left to do is wait for their response. But as the days go by, you find yourself constantly refreshing your inbox—only to get lost in a flood of other emails. Recruiters, friends, promo deals, and newsletters all clutter your screen, making it harder to spot the one email that actually matters.
As you think about this, you remember a friend in your program mentioning how they used Power Automate to organize emails into spreadsheets for better tracking. You don’t know much about it yet, but this sounds like the perfect opportunity—not just to clean up your inbox, but to build valuable automation skills along the way.
Instead of sifting through endless emails, why not create a simple system that pulls only the sender and subject line into a spreadsheet? That way, you can focus on what’s important at a glance—without getting distracted by the clutter.
Instructions
Setting Up Your Automation
Before you begin, ensure your Microsoft license supports OneDrive, Excel Online, and Power Automate. For ease of use, all three should be linked to the same account email.
Steps to Email Organization
- Set Up Your Excel Table
- In OneDrive, create a new Excel file in an easily accessible folder.
- Add a table with two columns, one for Sender and the other for Subject.
- Name this table “Emails”.
- Log into Power Automate Online
- Visit (Power Automate Online)[make.powerautomate.com].
- If you’re a student with a Microsoft 365 license, sign in with your student email; if you’re a professional, use another appropriate email.
- Connect Your Email and OneDrive to Power Automate
- Open the Connections page (found on the left-hand side near the bottom).
- Add new connections using the same Microsoft account to keep everything within the Microsoft ecosystem:
a. Office 365 Outlook
b. OneDrive for Business
c. Excel Online (Business)
- Create a New Flow
- Start a new Power Automate Flow and select Automated Cloud Flow.
- Define the Trigger
- For training purposes, set it to activate when you send an email to yourself.
- After you’re confident it works, you may configure it to activate when the sender is another email address.
- Configure the Add a Row to a Table Tool
- Add to your flow the excel tool called “Add a row to a table.”
- Connect the tool to your previously created Excel file and table.
- Configure the tool to add the sender and subject to the correct columns. This is done by clicking on the lightning bolt next to the sender and subject under the advanced parameters.
- Test Your Automation
- Save your flow
- Place the flow in test mode by clicking test in the top right corner and selecting “Manual” at the top and “test” at the bottom.
- Send yourself an emai.
- The blank testing screen should show you how each test runs as it is triggered and moves through each step.
- If nothing happens within a minute after you receive your email, check your email trigger again to make sure it’s triggers with the exact same email address that you received in your inbox.
- Check if the extracted information appears in your excel spreadsheet.
- Post your solution
- Remember to post a screenshot of your solution in the comments section!
Suggestions and Hints
Don’t hesitate to use Power Automate’s built-in AI Copilot, but keep in mind that it can still make mistakes and misinterpret your flow.
Solution
