Trigger a Power Automate flow only when a column has a specific value in SharePoint list

I am working on SharePoint in one of my recent projects and kind of like a lot the way Microsoft have tightly coupled the SharePoint events with Power Automate. There are so many stuffs that you can do in SharePoint through Power Automate in a matter of minutes.

And here I was with a very simple requirement – “Trigger a Power Automate flow only when a column in SharePoint list is set to a certain value”. For this demo, I am using a template list called Employee Onboarding.

The requirement is fairly easy here. Unless the Complete field is set to Yes, a flow should not trigger.

Seems fairly easy. So I went ahead and started with the following trigger of Power Automate cloud flow.

“When an item is created or modified“.

I chose my site collection and the list name. With this trigger the flow will fire for any column update in the list and not just when Complete has been set to Yes.

To accomplish this I then have to use a check condition to check for the value of Complete field.

While this will work fine, it is not the ideal approach. After all the flow will be triggered innumerable number of times for every field update before the Complete field is set to Yes.

But how can we avoid this? Like in so many other cases, sometimes the gems are kept secret. Every step in Power Automate flow do have some settings and so do the – “When an item is created or modified” trigger.

In the Settings pane, at the bottom, there are ‘Trigger conditions’ area where you can actually go ahead ad set multiple trigger conditions.

Let’s put in our own trigger condition here.

Click on “Done” and that’s it. Now your Power Automate flow will only fire once the Complete field has been set to Yes.

Easy isn’t it? I wonder why Microsoft have kept it hidden in the settings section. Nonetheless we are aware of it and know how to use it now.

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Hope this helped!

Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP