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Getting started and have licensing questions

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Posted on by NewAndConfused

Hi everyone,

I'm an individual user who would like to set up Power Automate and Office Scripts in a cloud environment a few small personal projects in collaboration with a few individiduals.

What I'm confused about is what platform and licensing I need to get started. (Both for Power Automate and Office)

What I'd ideally do is have one license for the cloud platform / automation (One Drive or SharePoint and Power Automate) and be able to give some anonymous users access to excel for web files where they would be able to trigger flows that would update a central data store file, most likely just excel (or I could do lists as well, perhaps).

Ideally, I'd be the only one paying for a license and I'd only need to pay for one. If that's not possible, I'd like to know what the minimum licensing requirements are so I can figure out if this personal project is worth the expense.

I've been going a bit crazy searching the web to figure this out for weeks and to no avail. I've had no success figuring out if there's a Microsoft help resource that can answer my questions either.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

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Rhiassuring 8,692 Moderator on at

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I'm pretty sure all you need is M365 Business Basic. That's what I was using for a while and I was able to share files, create Power Automate (many many of them) flows, no issues.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/microsoft-365/business#coreui-heading-hiatrep

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NewAndConfused 10 on at

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Thanks for your reply.

Do you think my users will be able to do initiate flows from their spreadsheets (Excel for web) if they're in the spreadsheet anonymously in a browser? Or do I need to pay for licenses for them as well? In particular I need to be able to trigger changes in a central data store from flows triggered in individual other spreadsheets that the users will be using.

Thanks again.

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Rhiassuring 8,692 Moderator on at

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Is your flow watching for changes in that particular spreadsheet? Because if so, yes. That will still work, and be triggered.

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NewAndConfused 10 on at

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I've only done a few flows for work and that was quite a while ago, so I'm not entirely sure what I'll set up.
Best thing may be to do an analogy.
Users have individual spreadsheets that record what books they've read.
Central data store is a library of available books.
Only one user can "use" a book for a given period.
Goal 1 is to have users update what they've read and in what period and record the transaction in the library.
Once that transaction is recorded in the library, the other users (through a data connection) can see that that particular book is now unavailable for that particular period.
Next person makes their request for the period from what's now available, and so on.
So the library keeps track of what everyone's done, while at the same time serves as a storefront to keep people aware of what it's possible to do.
Later functionality I'd likely add would be for the client spreadsheets to talk to each other about "teaching" each other instead of learning from a book in the library. The central store would still record the event even though it's not "book" related. But each client spreadsheet for each period only can do 3 things: it can "learn" from another client, or check out a book, or "teach" another client. And which it chooses for each period get's recorded locally and in the central data store.

My original thought is to do the goal 1 functionality of just updating the central data store would be from a flow initiated by the client that's checking out the book.

The teach/learn flow will be a bit trickier because I have the user that needs to initiate the "teach" action and the second user that needs to "accept" the "learn" action before the transaction is recorded anywhere.

But the main question for me right now is if that plan is feasible without needing more licenses than just the developer's license.

Thanks again, so much.

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Rhiassuring 8,692 Moderator on at

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I think it's going to just be a trigger on a modified file, where you point at the individual user excel sheets. I'm guessing you don't want them to see eachother so they'd all need separate excel sheets and thus flows as well.

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