Gif on how the app works.

Power App Award Generator

Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Platform, Ukategorisert / By

Introduction

A little weekend project. Generating award diplomas using Power Apps, Power Automate, OneDrive, and Word Template. In this post, we look at how the project is built in a step-by-step format. Hopefully, you find other use cases where this can be applied. For instance, populating Word templates such as contracts, newsletters, Christmas cards, and any type of document that have similar content and doesn’t change too much.

Table of Content

  • Creating the Diploma Word Template
  • Creating the Power Automate Flow for Generating Diplomas
  • Creating the Power App
  • GIF Walkthrough of the App
  • Conclusion

Prerequisites

  • A trial or environment for customizing apps and flows
  • A license for Office Apps and sending emails with Outlook
  • Familiar with Word Templates
  • Familiar with Power Automate
  • Familiar with Power Apps

Creating the Diploma Word Template

This step-by-step walk you through the process of creating a Word Template that we are going to populate with values from Power Apps.

Step 1: Open Word > Click on More Templates.

Image of the landing page when the word application opens and choosing more templates.
Image of the landing page when the word application opens and choosing more templates.

Step 2: After clicking on More templates > Search for Diploma > The search result changes to another view.

Image on how to search for templates in Word
Image on how to search for templates in Word

When the search result opens > Select the Diploma certificate and a dialog opens > Click Create to create a new Word file from the template.

Image on how to create a word file from an existing template.
Image on how to create a word file from an existing template.

Step 3: To be able to create a Word Template that we can populate with Power Automate we need to enable det Developer setting in Word.
Go to File > Options > Customize Ribbon > Check the Developer checkbox under Main Tabs in the dialog as seen in the image below.

Image on how to enable the Developer tab in Word.
Image on how to enable the Developer tab in Word.

Step 4: Next we are looking at how to create dynamic values that we are going to populate with Power Automate.

After adding the Developer tab and we are back at the Tempate we do the following to create a dynamics template we are going to use in Power Automate. First highlight the text we want to populate > Click on the Developer tab > Click on Aa to add text as the value to populate > Click on Properties to give the field that we are going to populate a name. This opens a dialog as can be seen in the image after the one below.

Image on how to add property to a Word template used to populate with Power Automate
Image on how to add property to a Word template used to populate with Power Automate

Give the control a Title and a Tag as seen in the image below and click OK.

Image on how to add properties to the Word template
Image on how to add properties to the Word template

Step 5: Proceed the same steps for all parts of the Word template we want to add dynamic values to. In this example, I added the following properties in the template as seen in the list and image below.

  • FullName
  • CertificationDescription
  • TypeOfCertification
  • DateOfCompletion
  • SignedByOne
  • SignedByTwo
List of properties in the Word Template.
List of properties in the Word Template.

Step 5: After adding the properties to the template Save the template and save it to your OneDrive. In this example, I’ve created a root folder named Award Generator and added the template in the root folder, and another folder for Generated Awards where all the awards is stored.
See image below for reference.

Image of folder structure in the Award Generator project.
Image of folder structure in the Award Generator project.

Step 6: This concludes the steps for creating a Word template with properties available to populate with Power Automate.

Creating the Power Automate Flow for Generating Diplomas

The next step, is to create a Power Automate flow that uses the Word template and populates the properties with dynamic values from the Power App.

Below is the overview of the flow, we look more into the details in the steps in this section.

Overview of the flow that generates the Award templates
Overview of the flow that generates the Award templates

Step 1:

First, we need to add the Power Apps V2 trigger. It allows as to specify the parameter in the trigger itself and here we add all the properties we added to the template, and an email property that we are using to send the award to the person we want to.

Image of the Power Apps (V2) trigger.
Image of the Power Apps (V2) trigger.

Step 2: The first actions in the flow is:

A compose action for creating a predefined naming standard for the awards, which might looks like this “2022.11.11_Chef_of_the_Year_John_Doe”. The formula used looks like the following:

// DateOfCompletion_TypeOfCertification_FullName
formatDateTime(triggerBody()['text_5'],'yyyy.MM.dd')_replace(triggerBody()['text_1'],' ','_')_replace(triggerBody()['text'],' ','_')

Further, we use the action Populate a Microsoft Word template to generate the award document with the values sent from the Power App.

Next, we create the file in the OneDrive folder we looked at earlier using the OneDrive Connector..

Image on how to populate word templates with Power Automate.
Image on how to populate word templates with Power Automate.

Step 3: The remaining steps in the flow.
Continuing, we convert the Word template to a pdf file using the action Convert Word Document to PDF.

Next, we create the PDF to the OneDrive folder and afterwards we get the content by using the action Get File Content.

Onwards, we clean up the folder by deleting the Word template that has been converted into a PDF. For deleting the fil we used the action Delete File.

The last step, is uses the action Send an email (V2) with the award PDF as an attachment.

Image of how to convert Word template to PDF file and send it with Outlook.
Image of how to convert Word template to PDF file and send it with Outlook.

Step 4: This concludes the part about how the Power Automate is built. Next up, is the Power App.

Creating the Power App

In this section we look at how the Power App is built. Below is an image of how the app looks.

Image of the Award Generator Power Apps.
Image of the Award Generator Power Apps.

Step 1: First we need to create the fields that we added to the Power Automate flow.

Image of the fields in the Power App
Image of the fields in the Power App

Step 2: We need to add the Power Automate flow to the Power App.

Image on how to add a Power Automate flow to a Power App
Image on how to add a Power Automate flow to a Power App

Step 3: Next, we add a call on the button Generate Award that calls the Power Automate flow with the values of all of the fields. This triggers the flow and handles all the steps from generating diplomas and sending them the email address specified in the Send To input field.

Image on how to call a Power Automate flow in Power Apps
Image on how to call a Power Automate flow in Power Apps

Step 3: These are the main parts of the app and concludes the section. Next up, is a gif of how the app looks like when running.

GIF Walkthrough of the App

This section contains a gif showing how it looks like when you run it.

Gif on how the app works.
Gif on how the app works.

Conclusion

Too sum up, this was a little fun project to test out how to populate Word Templates using Power Automate.

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