Copy to my Clipboard Feature in MSFlow

Inside of Microsoft Flow, we may find ourselves in a situation where we need to perform similar actions, repeatedly. One such scenario is updating a SharePoint list as a process progresses through different stages of the business process.

For example, consider a scenario where a user will create a list item in SharePoint, and we want to launch an approval as a result of that record being created. As we move through the approval process, we need to update a status field in the SharePoint list. This requires us to create several updates by using the Update item action that is part of the SharePoint connector. Our initial update will include an Expense State value of Pending Approval. Once we have either received an Approval or a Rejection, we also need to update the SharePoint list. We can go ahead an add multiple Update item actions to our flow, but that is tedious as we must provide our Site Address, List Name, Id, Title and Expense State each time.

Instead of manually adding these actions, we can use the new Copy to my clipboard statement by clicking on the … Copy to my clipboard menu item from our initial Update item action.

We can then “paste” this action by adding a new action beneath our Approval stage. We will see a new tab emerge called My clipboard which contains our Update item action that we just copied in the previous stage. We can click on Update item – Pending Approval to add a copy of this action in this location on our flow.

Some updates to this action that are required. But, in this situation, we do not need to change the Site Address, List Name,** Id**, or Title. We only need to change our Expense State.

Finally, we use the same approach to update our Rejected process by accessing our clipboard and changing our Expense State to be Rejected.
Note: The My clipboard cache is cleared each time you logout of Flow.

Conclusion

In this post, we discovered the Copy to my clipboard feature which allows users to re-use existing actions instead of having to re-create them all the time. This is a great way to boost productivity by avoiding inputting redundant values into actions.