Microsoft Power Automate (Formally Microsoft Flows) – University of Houston

Get started with Power Automate

Who is Power Automate for?

What skills do you need to have? Anyone from a basic business user to an IT professional can create automated processes using Power Automate's no-code/low-code platform.

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.

Check out the start page

On the start page for Power Automate, you can explore a diverse set of templates and learn about the key features for Power Automate. You can get a quick sense of what's possible and how Power Automate could help your business and your life.

Each template is designed for a specific purpose. For example, there are templates for sending you a text message when your boss emails you, adding Twitter leads to Dynamics 365, or backing up your files. These templates are just the tip of the iceberg. They're intended to inspire you to create customized flows for the exact processes you need.

Create your first flow

Select a template that's useful for you. A simple template is Get daily reminders in Email:
Select Continue.
Enter the email addresses to which the daily reminder will be sent. Next, enter the reminder message. Finally, select Create flow, and then verify that your flow is running as expected.

Note

You can explore the conditions that trigger the flow and the action that results from that event. Play around with the settings to make the flow your own. You can even add or delete actions.
Select Done.

Follow this tutorial to learn more about creating flows from templates.

Get creative

Now that you've created your first flow from a template, use any of the more than 380 data sources that Power Automate supports to create your own flows from scratch.

Building a cloud flow

When you create a cloud flow from scratch, you control the entire workflow. Here are a few ideas to get your started:

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.

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.

Get notifications when something's wrong

Use the Power Automate notification center (located at the top right of the designer) to quickly see a list of flows have failed recently. The notification center displays a number that indicates the number of flows that failed recently.

From the notification center, you can navigate to the Activity page of Power Automate to see all your flows that recently ran, sent notifications, or failed.

Notification center

For more help visit this site: Guided Learning