Run Flow from Stream Deck - Ad-hoc meeting

I got a cool shiny Stream Deck, courtesy of Elgato and Scottish Summit. A Stream Deck is a go-to tool for streamers but can also be a useful for people who like being productive. I asked the community what I should do with it and the first they said was "You should build a flow and trigger it from it". Great idea, but how do you do it? 🤔

Create a flow and choose the HTTP Request trigger. This is a premium trigger so you will require a premium license for this type of flow. Before you save the flow, the URL will not be available, it is generated after save, so do not worry about this right now.

Click "show advanced options" and change the method to GET. This will mean you can launch the flow by going to a navigating to the HTTP GET URL in browser.

This is how to launch the flow, but how do we make a button like this useful? I often get a teams message to see if I'm free for a quick chat, and then I try to update my calendar with a meeting so that I know what I did each day. So lets do that.

Add a new action search for the Office 365 connector and choose the "Create an Event V4" action. Pick a Calendar, most likely it will just be called "Calendar" and add a subject. I chose one that I will quickly change after each meeting. Put in a start time and an end time.

Here I'm using utcNow() function for the start time, you may need to adjust this for your timezone, and then I'm using a function called addMinutes() for the End Time. I'm making this appointment 30 minutes, although you can change it.

addMinutes(utcNow(),30)

Next, I disable the reminder on the event, so I don't immediately get the popup to say a meeting is about to start. To find this, click "show advanced options" and set "is reminder on" to No.

You flow should now look like this. Save it and it will generate the URL in the trigger. Copy this to your clipboard so we can use this next.

Next, open your steam deck menu and find a free button to assign this to, right click and choose "Create Multi Action".

We need to add a "Website" action which is under the "System" heading. Add the action and give it a title. Then put the URL you got from your trigger and put it in the URL field. This will open the website in a tab in your web browser, but won't close it down. Add a "Hotkey" action and record the inputs "Ctrl+W" which is a keyboard shortcut for closing a tab.

Optional last step, go back to the home screen on the Stream Deck and click on the drop down arrow next to the Icon and Set the Icon from file. You can download the Power Platform Icons here. You can also give the action a title.

That's it, press the button, your flow will trigger and you will get an ad-hoc meeting in your calendar.

I've created this as a template which you can download from my GitHub here.

Ciao for now