Power Platform Is More Approachable Than You Think

A conversation with Dan Costello, Senior Power Platform Instructor and recipient of Microsoft's Top 100 MCT Quality Award in Data & AI

There's a good chance your organization is sitting on a set of tools that could save your team hours every week — and you're already paying for them.

Microsoft Power Platform — which includes Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and Copilot Studio — comes bundled with most Microsoft 365 licenses. We recently sat down with Dan Costello — one of our most experienced Power Platform instructors and a recent recipient of Microsoft's Top 100 MCT Quality Award in Data and AI — about who Power Platform is really for and what most people get wrong about it.

Power BI: "Nobody Needs to Be a Specialist to Use This Thing"

There's a common misconception that Power BI is a technical tool built for data analysts. Dan pushes back hard on that idea.

"Power BI is a great standalone tool. It is in many ways easier to use than Excel," he says. "The idea that Power BI is technical and it's primarily designed for analyst-type people is just really not true. Anybody who is any kind of knowledge worker — which is basically everybody — probably has some application for Power BI."

To illustrate, Dan walks through three clients he works with regularly — none of whom are technical people.

"One of them is a nonprofit that uses Power BI all the time. It's a small organization, they don't have a lot of people, but they have a ton of data — they have hundreds of part-time employees because of the nature of the work. They're working with money and medical stuff and just all kinds of data feeds. And that's what Power BI is really good at — I need to get this Excel sheet that I export from some program and make charts of it so that I can more readily see outliers. That's what it's good for."

His second example? A car dealership manager. "Very non-technical. They have this terrible back-end system that does produce data, but it's a terrible system, and the data is not clean and you've got to fix it up. His comment to me is that if he didn't have the Power BI solution we spent years putting together for him, he might as well just quit — because it gives him visibility that he just can't get from any other tool that he has."

And a third — an analyst at a state agency who needs to marry budget projections with actuals across multiple antiquated systems.

"The common thread here is that nobody needs to be a specialist to use this thing," Dan says. "It's not unreasonable to say: hey, do you use Excel? Well, you might consider Power BI. Everybody uses Excel — if they're a landscaper or a nurse or a poll worker, whatever — and in many cases Power BI is a better fit."

Power Automate: "If It's Simple, Can You Automate It?"

Dan frames Power Automate around a principle he borrows from the productivity world: if a task is simple and repetitive, it's a candidate for automation.

"That is literally what Power Automate is for," he says. "Not in terms of the technology or the features, but just in terms of what can this do for your life."

He starts with a hands-on example. An organization receives notifications by email — every deposit, every account update, across multiple accounts. Someone had been manually opening each email and entering the data into a spreadsheet.

"Every time an email hits his inbox that has certain characteristics — it's from this sender, it has this in the subject line — Power Automate goes and grabs the content, parses it, and writes it to an Excel spreadsheet in SharePoint, which is then used as a data source for Power BI," Dan explains. "That's a very practical example of something that everybody has to do from time to time. We get automated emails, some of them have information we need to do something with. Power Automate makes it shockingly easy to do."

And it's not just data ingestion. Dan describes a training engagement with a healthcare organization that needed to notify specific providers about patient conditions — something that happened many times a week and had been done entirely by hand.

"They were so excited when we started doing the training and figured out that we could automate this stuff in Power Automate. Because Power Automate is extraordinarily good at that kind of thing. You can just tell it: every morning at 8:00 AM, go query this SharePoint list or this Excel document or this database table, take the results, and send an email. And these are not technical people — they're technical in terms of their extreme expertise in their line of work, but they're not computer people. And it's an easy tool to use."

Approval Workflows: Keeping Humans in the Loop

One of Power Automate's most common — and most practical — use cases is what Dan calls approval flows. The idea is simple: something happens automatically, but at some point a human needs to make a decision.

"The simplest case is: someone added a document to a document library, somebody else needs to approve that document. So it sends them an email or a Teams message saying this has happened, here's a link to the document, click approve or reject. And they click approve or reject and the flow wakes back up and does something as a result of that person's decision."

But it can go much further. Dan built a workflow for a small company's operations team that handled their entire job order process. "Every time a job order comes in, somebody has to say OK, it's this kind of job order — that means this person has to get the permits, this person has to order parts, this person has to schedule the work. And then once the parts have been ordered, these people have to be informed. Once the permits have been retrieved, they have to be stored in this library, these people have to be informed. This had been an entirely email-based process."

The result? "The first week they were using it, she estimated they probably saved a couple hours total — and that was just the first week as everyone was kind of figuring out how to do it. Because you're not sitting there writing emails. You're just pushing buttons and being informed of things and being reminded of things when it's been too long."

Dan puts it simply: "It can do lots of fancy things, but the 95th percentile is the simple things. The stuff that most people are doing is: something just happened and I need something else to happen in response to that."

Power Apps and the Integration Advantage

Power Apps gets less airtime, but it fills a real gap — particularly when combined with the rest of the platform.

"People needed an application for data entry and there was no reason to make a Python application or anything," Dan says. "It literally just needs to enter data and have it appear in a SharePoint list. And Power Apps makes that really easy to do."

Where things get particularly interesting is when these tools work together. Dan describes a scenario where a client's sales team used Power BI to analyze data from thousands of franchises. They needed the ability to filter the report, snapshot a particular view, and then write data back — something Power BI doesn't do natively.

"Power BI doesn't have the ability to write back to the data source — it's a read-only thing. But what it does allow is embedding Power Automate flows and Power Apps into your Power BI reports," Dan explains. "So we gave them a Power Automate button. When they push the button, it looks at the state of the filters in the report and writes that back to a database table."

He also points out that Power Apps lets you embed a full app inside a Power BI report: "From the user's point of view, their report has a little form in it that they can fill in and it actually writes stuff back to the data."

Copilot Studio and AI: Where It's Heading

Microsoft has added Copilot Studio to the Power Platform family, and Dan sees it as a natural extension of capabilities that have already been proving their value.

Dan is someone who works with AI tools every day. "Anytime I'm writing code, I use GitHub Copilot — it's too useful not to use, even with its limitations. Once you learn to work with the limitations, it's amazing. Huge force multiplier."

That practical mindset — learn the tools, understand what they're good at right now, and put them to work — is how he frames Copilot Studio for his clients. And some of the most useful AI capabilities have actually been part of the Power Platform for years.

"Natural language processing — not LLM, much lighter weight — it's been around for years. But you can do things like entity extraction and sentiment analysis," he says. Dan describes a class where participants realized they could automate monitoring their customer service forum for negative comments. "You can throw a sentiment analysis in there and say: if you have 80% or above confidence that this is a negative comment, let me know. That is a three-step flow. You could build that in 15 minutes."

The reaction in the room? "They were like, really?"

Looking ahead, Dan sees Copilot Studio opening up even more powerful applications — particularly intelligent routing. Imagine an agent that could flag a negative customer email, parse it, summarize it, and route it to the right team. "It says OK, this looks more like it's a technical thing or a financial thing, and routes it to the right people with a bullet point summary of what the message says."

Dan notes that the broader AI landscape is evolving fast, and there's naturally a lot of excitement about what's coming next. But that's exactly why a grounded, practical approach matters. The organizations getting real value from Copilot Studio are the ones starting with specific, well-defined problems — like sentiment monitoring or intelligent triage — and building from there. As the platform continues to mature, those foundations will be the ones that scale.

You're Probably Already Paying for This

Here's the part that catches most organizations off guard. Dan puts it bluntly:

"Most people that have Microsoft 365, which is most people, already have the licensing for these things. They already could be doing this. They don't need anything. They don't need to buy software or justify anything to their company. Their company is already paying for it. They're just not taking advantage of it."

He's not talking about enterprise-level licensing, either. "I have the cheapest Microsoft 365 business license — like eight bucks a month — and I've got Power Automate and Power Apps and a little bit of Power BI just as part of the licensing for that."

For organizations that need more advanced capabilities — premium Power BI features, AI integrations, desktop automation — additional licensing is available. But the starting point is already there, built into what you're paying for today.

Getting Started with Power Platform: Awareness Is the Gap

When Dan talks about the people who show up for training, a pattern emerges. Most of them have already committed to using these tools — they've heard good things, they've seen colleagues doing interesting work, or leadership has decided the organization is moving in this direction. But many of them are brand new to the tools themselves.

"It's very common to do a Power Platform course and have most of the participants say, I've never seen this thing before, I'm interested in knowing what it is. Or: I've heard good things about Power BI, or I've seen some cool stuff my colleagues are doing with this, but I've not used it myself."

In the case of Power BI specifically, Dan sees a lot of heavy Excel users making the jump. "It's quite common to get people that are using Excel all the time but recognize that Power BI probably solves some of their problems better."

The real gap isn't in the technology. It's in knowing what's possible. And that's something training — whether it's one of the courses on our public schedule or a private engagement tailored to your team — can solve quickly.

As Dan puts it: "Nobody needs to be a specialist to use this thing." And that might be the most important thing to know.

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ONLC Training Centers offers both public classes and private training engagements for Microsoft Power Platform, including Power BI, Power Automate and Power Apps, and Copilot Studio. Private training can be tailored to your team's specific workflows and goals. Contact us to learn more.