The Missing Manual
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← Back to guide / Phase 2
Updated Jun 30, 2026

Connectors, Approvals & Data

This phase is where you move from "I made a flow that pings Teams" to "I built something my team relies on." Three things matter: knowing which connectors cost extra, using the approval system Microsoft already built for you, and getting your flow to read and write real data - SharePoint lists, Dataverse tables - with a bit of expression glue.

Standard vs premium: the line that costs money

The single most common surprise for new builders is dragging in a connector, finishing the flow, hitting save, and getting told they need a premium license. So learn the split before you build.

Standard connectors come with most Microsoft 365 business plans. The everyday ones:

  • Office 365 Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business
  • Microsoft Teams, Planner, To Do
  • Excel (Online), Forms, Approvals, Notifications

Premium connectors need a paid Power Automate plan stacked on top of your 365 license. The ones that bite people:

  • SQL Server, and most third-party databases
  • The generic HTTP action - the moment you want to call any API that doesn't have its own connector, you've gone premium
  • Salesforce, Jira, and many other non-Microsoft business apps
  • Custom connectors (your own API wrapped as a connector)
  • Dataverse, in many licensing scenarios
RULE OF THUMB
  Staying inside Microsoft 365 (mail, files, lists, Teams)? → usually standard, included.
  Reaching out to a database, a raw API, or a third-party SaaS? → expect premium.

Microsoft has shifted its licensing over the years toward per-user and per-flow premium plans, and the exact names and prices change. Don't memorize a number - instead, before you build anything beyond plain 365, check what your tenant is actually licensed for. The connector picker flags premium connectors with a label; trust that flag and confirm with whoever owns the bill. A flow that works in the editor but can't run in production because nobody has the license is a classic, demoralizing trap.

Approvals: the feature worth showing up for

If you build one thing in Power Automate, make it an approval. The Approvals connector is genuinely well done and saves you from reinventing the most common business workflow there is: "someone requested something, a human needs to say yes or no."

You add a Start an approval action. You pick the approver(s), write the title and details, and choose the type:

  • Approve/Reject – First to respond: any one approver can decide.
  • Approve/Reject – Everyone must approve: all of them have to sign off.
  • Custom responses: your own buttons, like "Approve / Send back / Reject."

The approver gets a card - in Outlook, in Teams, or in the Power Automate app - with Approve and Reject buttons right there. They don't leave their inbox. Your flow then waits at that step. When the response comes back, the flow continues, and you branch on the outcome:

flowchart TD
  R[Request submitted] --> S[Start approval to manager]
  S --> W{Outcome}
  W -->|Approve| Y[Update record, notify requester]
  W -->|Reject| N[Mark rejected, ask for changes]

The flow can sit paused at that approval for hours or days - that's normal and expected. You get the responses, the comments, and a timestamp recorded automatically, which is exactly what you want when someone later asks "who approved this and when?"

Reading and writing your data

Most useful flows revolve around a data store. In a Microsoft shop, that's usually a SharePoint list or a Dataverse table.

A SharePoint list is a structured table living in SharePoint - columns, rows, types. It's where small teams keep requests, trackers, and inventories. The SharePoint connector gives you the bread-and-butter actions: When an item is created or modified (trigger), Get items, Create item, Update item, Get item. Build a request tracker as a list, trigger a flow on new items, route an approval, and write the outcome back to the row. That pattern alone covers a huge amount of real office work.

Dataverse is the heavier option - a proper relational database underpinning the Power Platform, with relationships, security roles, and business rules. Reach for it when a SharePoint list stops being enough: thousands of rows, strict permissions, related tables that need to stay in sync. Note that Dataverse usually lands on the premium side of the license line, so factor that in.

Expressions: the glue you'll eventually need

You can build a lot by filling in boxes. But sooner or later you need to compute something - format a date, default a blank field, build a string, do a small calculation. That's expressions, written in a formula language (it's the same Workflow Definition Language under the hood, and it looks like spreadsheet functions).

A few you'll reach for constantly:

utcNow()                          -- right now, as a timestamp
formatDateTime(utcNow(),'yyyy-MM-dd')   -- today as 2026-06-30
concat('Hello ', triggerBody()?['Name'])   -- glue strings together
coalesce(item()?['Owner'], 'Unassigned')   -- fall back if blank
if(greater(item()?['Amount'], 500), 'High', 'Low')   -- inline decision

You add these in the same fields where you'd type plain text, via the expression editor. Don't go overboard - if a step is turning into a wall of nested expressions, that's a sign the logic belongs in a condition or a clearer set of steps. Reach for expressions to fill gaps, not to write programs inside a text box.

Get these three down - the connector split, approvals, and reading/writing your data with a little expression glue - and you can build the bulk of what an office actually needs. The last phase is the other world: desktop RPA, for the old apps that don't have a connector at all.