Most of the people don’t realize it is possible to create Microsoft Flow flows directly from your Smartphone and that it is not necessary to have a corporate account to do that.
It is quite a powerful tool, and very straightforward to use even from a Smartphone.
First of all, you’ll need to have Microsoft Flow mobile installed on your Smartphone. You can get it here:
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.flow&hl=en
iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-flow/id1094928825?mt=8
Windows Mobile: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/store/p/microsoft-flow/9nkn0p5l9n84?rtc=1
After it is installed and you are logged in to your Microsoft Account, you can then begin playing with it.
Open the Flow app, then go to the Flows section:
Click the button (+) to start creating your new Flow:
In this case, let’s use ‘Send message to my family’ as flow name. Let’s suppose I’d like to tell them where I am and how the weather is today. In my case they live in Brazil, so I’ll have to translate some results to Portuguese.
The first thing to do is to choose a trigger for the Flow. As we are going to demonstrate Flow mobile capabilities, search for Flow Button for mobile and add it as a trigger.
After that, the first action will be to get the weather forecast for today from MSN Weather.
Search for weather action, and insert the action ‘Get forecast for today’ from MSN Weather. You can change the units for Metric if you want. In my case, that’s going to be chosen because I’d like to get the temperature in Celsius. The city value comes from the Flow Button trigger. It detects the location you are from your Smartphone location at the time of starting the Flow.
Next step is to translate the weather conditions (the Temperature doesn’t matter because we are just going to show numbers). Now we add a new action ‘Translate Text’ from Microsoft Translator connector.
The conditions value come from MSN Weather action. The target language should be specified as Portuguese in this case.
The final action is to get all this content and build an e-mail message.
Just to show a different connector, let’s choose Gmail this time, and then build the final message to send, getting values from our previous actions and from the flow trigger.
In the body field, we are sending actually this message in Portuguese.
‘Hello
Today I’m in (City Name – From Flow Button for Mobile trigger).
The temperature is (Temperature Low – From MSN Weather action).
The weather is (Translated Text – From Microsoft Translator Action).’
After hitting ‘Create’, your Flow is ready to go.
To test it, go to the Buttons section of the flow app. Find the newly created button and tap it.
After that, the proper message will be sent to the specified address:
This is a simple sample of some cool stuff you can do directly from your Smartphone with MS Flow. Hope you all enjoyed it!
