Get started with Power Automate
Welcome! What can you expect from Power Automate? Here are a few examples of what you can do with Power Automate.
- Automate business processes
- Orchestrate processes end-to-end and trigger microservices
- Send automatic reminders for past due tasks
- Move business data between systems on a schedule
- Connect to more than 500 data sources or any publicly available API
- Use process mining to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for automation
- You can even automate tasks on your local computer like computing data in Excel
Just think about time saved once you automate repetitive manual tasks simply by recording mouse clicks, keystrokes and copy paste steps from your desktop! Power Automate is all about automation.
Skills required
Anyone from a basic business user to an IT professional can create automated processes using Power Automate's no-code/low-code platform.
Benifits by industry
Check out how some companies implemented Microsoft Power Platform solutions using Power Automate in:
Find examples from your industry
The first step in creating an automation is to sign up, or, if you already have an account with Power Automate, sign in.
Create a flow
Power Automate allows you to quickly and easily create cloud flows and use templates to solve your business needs. You can do the following:
Receive guided instruction for building your flow.
Find a template that addresses your needs by filtering through selections.
Automate your flows with new options in the New flow dropdown menu.
Note
The following steps describe the new experience to create flows using Power Automate. The rest of the Power Automate documentation will be updated soon to reflect this new experience.
You can start creating a flow by selecting Create on the left navigation pane.
You can then choose your path for creating a flow. Your two choices are Start with a template to find prebuilt flows, or Build your own to customize your own automation.
If you want even more ways to automate, select one of the following in the More ways to automate section:
Power Automate for desktop: Drag-and-drop or record the steps of a task to automate your process.
AI Builder: Accelerate digital transformation for complex scenarios with artificial intelligence.
Process advisor: Record and analyze processes to discover inefficiencies and make improvements.
Describe it to design it (preview): Transform your everyday words into a cloud flow (preview).
Start with a template
Power Automate makes intelligent choices to find the prebuilt templates that align best with your needs. It does this by filtering out the templates that won't work for you, leaving you with only the templates that might meet your business goals.
When you select Start with a template, the Find a template screen displays. This screen allows you to set filters to show as many templates as you want, and search for templates using keywords.
For example, if you select Microsoft Dataverse in the Filter by group, you'll get a list of many templates to choose from. If you're looking for Dataverse templates that include email, you can type email in the Search by keywords list.
You can also filter by connector name, template category, and publisher name. To customize your filter with these options, select More filters on the Find a template screen.
To learn more, go to Create a cloud flow from a template.
Build your own
If you select Build your own, Power Automate will guide you in selecting your triggers, actions, and connectors.
To learn how to build your own flow, go to Create a cloud flow from scratch. To learn about triggers, go to Get started with triggers. For an overview of connectors, go to Connectors overview.
Flow menu options
If you're already working in the My flows screen, you can stay where you are and create a new template from the New flows menu. You can start with a template, or build your own automation with the same interface used on the home screen. The menu also gives you the option to create a desktop flow, or a flow that uses a description of what you want to automate in everyday language.
To learn about desktop flows, go to Introduction to desktop flows. To learn how to use AI to build your flow, go to Create a cloud flow from a description (preview).
What are the different types of flows?
Visit the flow types article to learn more about the different types of flows that you can create to automate your tasks.
Find your flows easily
When your creative juices start flowing, you might create many flows. Don't worry, finding your flows is easy - just use the search box on the My flows, Team flows, Connections, or Solutions screen to display only flows that match the search terms you enter.
Note
The search filter only finds flows that have been loaded into the page. If you don't find your flow, try selecting Load more at the bottom of the page.
Peek at the code
You don't need to be a developer to create flows; however, Power Automate does provide a Peek code feature that allows anyone to take a closer look at the code that's generated for all actions and triggers in a cloud flow. Peeking at the code could give you a clearer understanding of the data that's being used by triggers and actions. Follow these steps to peek at the code that's generated for your flows from within the Power Automate designer:
Select the ... menu item at the top right corner of any action or trigger.
Select Peek code.
Notice the full JSON representation of the actions and triggers. This includes all inputs, such as the text you enter directly, and expressions used. You can select expressions here and then paste them into the Dynamic Content expression editor. This can also give you a way to verify the data you expect is present in the flow.
Get notifications when something's wrong
Visit the cloud flow activity page to see the list of cloud flows that recently ran, sent notifications, or have failed.
Sign into Power Automate.
On the left navigation pane, select Monitor.
Select Cloud flow activity.
Use the mobile app
Download the Power Automate mobile app for Android, iOS, or Windows Phone. With this app, you can monitor flow activity and manage your flows.
Get help planning your Power Automate projects
If you're ready to start your Power Automate project, visit the guidance and planning article to get up and running quickly.
We're here to help
We're excited to see what you do with Power Automate, and we want to ensure you have a great experience. Be sure to check out our guided learning tutorials and join our community to ask questions and share your ideas. Contact support if you run into any issues.
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