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Send email only when optional Forms field is filled using Power Automate

Posted on November 25, 2020April 14, 2021 by Tom

“I want to create a Power Automate email notification flow that emails a specific person whenever a specific, optional field is filled out in MS Forms.”


The easiest way is to connect Power Automate flow directly to the MS Forms form itself. When user submits a response, the flow will check what response was entered. If it contains data in the optional field, it’ll send an email. If not, don’t do anything.

Building the flow

The first step when working with (not only) MS Forms in Power Automate is the trigger. In this case it’s very simple as there’s only a single trigger connected to MS Forms. Automated trigger ‘When a new response is submitted’. The action will ask for ‘Form Id’, but it’ll offer you all your forms in a dropdown field. Just select your form from the options. Every time somebody will submit response to the Form, the flow will start.

Forms response trigger

Note: you must be the creator of the Form. You can’t create a flow on other user’s form, even if they shared it with you. Only the user who created the form initially can connect the flow to it.

The next step is to ‘Get response details’. Flow will start for each submitted response, but it needs to know which response it should process. That’s why you need to tell the flow “process THIS response on THIS form”. THIS response is the ‘Response Id’ output from the trigger ‘When a new response is submitted’, THIS form is the same form you selected in the first step.

Forms response details

Now the flow will load the response. It’ll know all the information that the user filled out. And you can use the information in a ‘Condition’. Use the field you want to check on the left side of the condition, keep the right side empty. If the field is not equal to [nothing], send an email. Otherwise don’t do anything (no action in the ‘If no’ branch).

If Forms optional field has value send an email

Summary

Adding Power Automate flow to your MS Forms can make your process much more effective. You don’t need to check all the responses on regular basis to see if you need to react. At the same time, you don’t need to receive an email for responses that are not time critical. A simple flow as described above can take over some of your work and you can spend your time on more important things.

And if you need more than just an email, you can store the responses into SharePoint instead of Excel files for further processing.


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Do you struggle with the various expressions, conditions, filters, or HTTP requests available in Power Automate?

I send one email per week with a summary of the new solutions, designed to help even non IT people to automate some of their repetitive tasks.

All subscribers have also access to resources like a SharePoint Filter Query cheat sheet or Date expressions cheat sheet.

Zero spam, unsubscribe anytime.

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