PowerAutomate on Mac

Sarah Behm

Hi all! Our organization is considering changing our IT infrastructure and we are weighing the pros and cons of PC vs. Mac, Microsoft 365 vs. GSuite. We are curious what the implications would be for Microsoft Power Platforms, specifically for Power Automate. If anyone has any insight or experience with the questions below, I would greatly appreciate your feedback!

• Anyone using Power Automate with only cloud based services (No desktop Microsoft programs)?
• What are the challenges in using Power Automate (PA) on Mac vs. PC that you've faced?
• Any Mac users have experience using an ARM-based architecture operating system (virtual machines/parallels?), the mobile app, or third-party wrappers? Have you found it difficult to create flows through any of these options?
• Anyone using Excel Power Queries with PA? Can you do this with Google Workspace? 
• Do you have to have a Microsoft Outlook account for automated email flows? Can you use Gmail?

• General Excel Q: Google Sheets vs SharePoint Excel vs Desktop Excel - what are the pros and cons? any important tools that are missing from google sheets vs. excel?

Thank you in advance for any help! 😊

Ben Regier

Power Automate is browser-based (unless you're talking about Power Automate Desktop, which is a very different beast and is more for automating desktop tasks), so it should work the same on any OS. I haven't used it on a Mac, but I've used it on Linux and it worked fine.

I've used non-Microsoft email addresses for Approval emails and "Emails with options" and they both work. For approvals, I believe you will need to add the non-Microsoft email address as a guest user in your tenant, and you may need to assign it a license as well. In general, the experience of interacting with Approvals is not as smooth for guest users, as they may have to log on to your tenant before they can complete their task. If there's no interaction and you only need to send notification emails, those can go to any email address without issue.