This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Power Automate 2024 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Power Automate 2024 Wave 2.

The 3rd of the new functionality in the Cloud flows section is be more productive with Power Automate and Excel desktop.

The new Automate work button in Excel Online makes it easier than ever to automate tasks and run processes from Excel running on Windows desktop and Mac devices. This allows users to automate repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and boost productivity with just a few clicks, all without leaving Excel, which makes it easy to respond to customers’ needs and improves satisfaction.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Dec 2024

Feature Details

This feature provides access to prebuilt templates and allows users to build workflows quickly and easily using a native automation capability in Excel desktop on Windows and Mac. An example of the template includes “Monitor incoming emails to an alias in an Excel worksheet” that businesses can use to keep track of customer feedback in Excel.

This capability supersedes the Automate a Task capability by introducing an integrated experience in Excel. These capabilities are different from the flow add-in.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Power Automate 2024 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Power Automate 2024 Wave 2.

The 2nd of the new functionality in the Cloud flows section is run a cloud flow for more than 30 days per invocation.

This feature enables you to have longer running automations that execute longer than 30 days with simplified design time experience.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Oct 2024
General Availability: –

Feature Details

Previously, you had to rely on dividing your automation business logic across multiple cloud flows (each of which would finish within 30 days) to span an end-to-end execution of more than 30 days. This feature simplifies the design and testing experience.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Power Automate 2024 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Power Automate 2024 Wave 2.

The 1st of the new functionality in the Cloud flows section is create Power Automate flows in Excel.

Makers can quickly create useful flows from the Automate tab in Excel. Excel is one of the most popular data tools in the world, with hundreds of millions of people using it for work and personal purposes across various industries. It has advanced features for teamwork, simplicity, flexibility, and automation. Power Automate simplifies the automation of tasks and processes from Excel.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Dec 2024

Feature Details

This feature improves the Automate work button by adding ready-made templates to the ribbon that give access to prebuilt templates and let users make workflows easily and quickly. This feature helps users start quickly in Excel. The prebuilt templates allow users to make workflows by entering information into the parameters. Makers can also view and manage their flows from Excel.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Power Automate 2024 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Power Automate 2024 Wave 2.

The 1st of the new functionality in the AI flows section is use generative AI to achieve a process in AI flows.

Instead of building out complex rules-based processes from beginning to end, you work with AI to create an automation plan. When you execute the plan, the large language model (LLM) considers all the resources available to it and dynamically selects the most appropriate actions to achieve the desired outcome.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Aug 2024
General Availability: Feb 2025

Feature Details

AI flows use generative AI reason over unstructured content and determine what steps and sequence are needed to achieve a process outcome based on instructions and parameters provided by you in natural language.

Building an AI flow is a fundamentally different user experience than building a rules-based cloud flow or desktop flow. It involves the following steps:

• Describe the objective of your process in natural language, and let AI develop an automation plan to achieve it.
• Refine the automation plan generated by the LLM and adjust inputs, outputs, and variables as needed. Add reference sources and guidelines in natural language that influence the LLM as it executes the flow.
• Validate the flow by reviewing how the AI flow is achieving the business objective prior to moving the flow into production.
• Review production run history, analytics, and individual flow run details to ensure your process is performing to expectations.

The ability of AI flows to easily incorporate both structured and unstructured data makes it flexible as information resources are updated. Its reasoning abilities make AI flows uniquely beneficial in the building and maintenance of complex process flows to handle conditions, exception management, and process loops.

This post is part of a series on the new functionality announced for Wave 2 of Microsoft Power Automate 2023. There are two release waves for Power Automate each year, with functionality being released over the six months of the wave.

In this series of posts, I am going to take a look at what is new with Power Automate in this release wave. My understanding is the announced new functionality will become available in the six months of the wave, so not all of it will be available immediately. When posting about some new functionality, I’ll try to indicate where something will be available in October or later. Microsoft do reserve the right to withdraw announced functionality before release; when this happens, I’ll try to publish an article on the removed functionality and update the original article I published to show that it has been removed from that release wave.

This series index, below (assuming you’re reading this on ), will automatically update as each post in the series goes live, so make sure you bookmark this post so you can see keep up-to-date with this series.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Power Automate 2024 Wave 2: Series Index”