Automate approvals
As I mentioned last week, we’re going to keep exploring how to make our automation more interesting and complete. In this edition, we’ll look at how to add approvals to our flow so that they’re sent automatically to the approver.
If you’ve ever worked with these actions and take a closer look, in the first dropdown we add, you’ll see different types of approval options:
The type of approval you choose will define how your list of approvers behaves.
Sequential approval: This allows for approvals in the order in which approvers are added. It won’t move on to the next person until the previous one has approved or rejected.
Approve or reject – First to respond: Only one approver needs to approve or reject for the process to continue.
Approve or reject – Everyone must approve: The flow will only continue if all approvers approve the request. If even one person rejects it, the process cannot move forward.
Custom responses – Wait for all responses: This allows approvers to respond with free text or with customized options you include in the approval, and it waits until everyone responds.
Custom responses – Similar to the previous option, this also allows for custom responses, but in this case it will only wait for one approver to respond.
Approval Formatting
Within the available configuration options, you can set the approval details. In this section, you can add useful information that helps approvers understand and validate the request.
If you look closely, Power Automate provides an online guide to help you format these details — since you can’t use HTML code in this action, the guide shows how to use markdown instead.
On the page Microsoft provides, you’ll see various Markdown options. In our case, we’ll use the ones under the Power Automate column.
Next, I’d like to show you some of the markdowns that I find most useful.
The one I use the most is bold text, as it helps highlight important information at a glance for the approver. It’s very simple: just wrap the word or phrase in ** at the beginning and end to make it bold.
Headings are also super easy to use. Just add one or more # symbols in front of the text to create headers, depending on the level you want — like in the example image below.
another favorite of mine. They're very helpful for clearly displaying information. This Markdown is a bit more complex because it requires more components.
To separate into columns, use the | symbol between each item. To separate headers from the rest of the table, use a line like |-----------| (yes, you need at least 11 dashes for it to work properly). Keep in mind this separator is only needed once — after that, just the column bars are enough.
So, in the example below, we have a first row with 3 columns: Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3, followed by two more rows with their corresponding values in each column.
And finally, I couldn’t leave out hyperlinks, which are always essential when working with SharePoint lists or any attachments that need to be approved.
To make the links work properly, you need to place the text you want to display inside [], and the URL inside ().
Example
In the following video, you can see how the action is created within the flow. By simply adding one new action, we can send an approval before notifying the user whether their vacation request has been approved or not.
Next, I’ll show you how to add a condition to send an email to the user whenever the approver either approves or rejects:
Ready to give it a try? I’d love to hear your feedback. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me through the blog or on LinkedIn.
Stay tuned — I’ll be back with more in the next post!
