Exercise - Creating a manual flow and using expressions
Let's say you need to find out how much it would cost to carpet a room based on its square footage. In this exercise, you create a manual flow that uses your input to do those calculations.
Sign into Power Automate.
Create a new Instant cloud flow.
Name it CalculateFlow and select Manually trigger a flow.
Select the Manually trigger a flow step and select Add an input.
Choose Number and name it Square Footage.
Select Add an input and choose Number again and name it Cost.
Select New Step and search for and select the Compose action.
Select the Inputs box and the Dynamic content window will appear.
Select the Expression tab and type in mul(. Power Automate knows that you're using the multiply expression and automatically add a ) at the end for you.
With your cursor still between the two parentheses in the expression field, select the Dynamic content tab.
Select Square Footage in the dynamic content.
Next add a comma (,) and choose Cost in the dynamic content.
The complete expression should be:
mul(triggerBody()['number'],triggerBody()['number_1'])Select OK to add the expression into the Compose step.
You know your expression is correct if it's added into the Compose step and looks like:
This compose step is now doing the math of calculating the square footage of the area multiplied by the cost per square foot based upon inputs you provide. However, we still need to convert the final result to currency to get the correct answer.
Select New Step and search for and select the Compose action again.
Select the Inputs box and again the Dynamic content window will appear.
Select the Expressions tab and type in formatNumber(.
With your cursor in place, select the Dynamic content tab and choose Outputs from the previous Compose step.
Next finish the expression with , 'C2'.
The C formats the number as currency, with the 2 representing how many decimal places. Refer to Standard numeric format strings for more number formats.
The complete expression is:
formatNumber(outputs('Compose'), 'C2')Select OK to add this expression in the Compose 2 step.
Now after our flow is triggered, it first multiplies the two numbers, then converts the result into the correct currency format. This gives you a quick way to get the cost associated with carpeting a room.
Your complete flow looks like this:
In the top-right corner, select the Save button, then select Test.
Choose I'll perform the trigger action and then select Test.
Enter the two number inputs, Square Footage and Cost, and then select Run flow at the bottom.
The page will reload and you'll see green check marks next to each step of your flow.
Selecting each step expands the details showing you the inputs and outputs of each step.
Selecting Compose will show the multiplied value of the two numbers you entered, while selecting Compose 2 will show the currency format of that multiplied value.
Let's recap what we've done.
Manually trigger a flow - Allows us to press a button to trigger a flow and provide inputs. In this case our two inputs are Square Footage and Cost, which we're using to find out the total price to carpet a room.
Compose - Used to write expressions using the data from elsewhere in the flow. In this case, we first multiplied the two inputs from the trigger. This gave us the correct number, but we still needed to convert it to currency. We then used another compose action to format the multiplied result into currency, giving us the answer to how much it would cost to carpet a room.