Power Automate is a service you can use to automate repetitive operations and increase productivity across all enterprises.
Here are a few examples of what Power Automate can accomplish for you:
- Automate business processes.
- Automatically remind users of due dates for tasks.
- Schedule the transfer of business data between systems.
- Connect to publicly available API or one of more than 500 data sources.
- You may even automate processes on your own computer, such as data computation in Excel.
You can design desktop, cloud, or business process flows.
Cloud flows in Power Automate
Create a cloud flow if you want to start automation automatically, immediately, or on a set schedule.
| Cloud flow type | Case study | Automation target |
| Automated flows | Create an automation that is activated by a specific event, such as the opening of an email from a particular individual or a social media mention of your business. | Cloud or on-premises service connectors link your accounts and allow them to communicate with one another. |
| Instant flows | Simply click a button to begin automation. From your desktop or mobile device, you can automate monotonous operations. For instance, you may quickly remind your colleagues using your mobile device by pressing a button. | A variety of activities, like asking for an action to be taken in Teams or SharePoint. |
| Scheduled flows | Make a cloud flow that completes single or multiple tasks (such as sending a report in email): Every day, every hour, or every minute. On a day that you designate. When you specify a certain number of days, hours, or minutes. | Scheduled tasks that need to be automated. |
Desktop flows
To automate processes on the desktop or the Web, use desktop flows.
Users may automate any repetitive desktop tasks with the help of desktop flows, which expand Power Automate’s RPA capabilities.
With the new intuitive Power Automate desktop flow designer, automating is quicker and simpler than ever. Users may use the prebuilt drag-and-drop actions or record their desktop flows to execute later.
You can automate both simple and complex activities, for instance::
- Quickly arrange your documents using actions for specific files and folders.
- Using online and Excel automation, accurately extract data from websites and store it in files.
- Utilize desktop automation tools to automate your tasks.
Microsoft made Power Automate for everyone, whether you’re a home user looking up the weather forecast for tomorrow, a self-employed businessperson collecting data from vendor invoices, or even a large corporation employee automating data entry on an ERP system.
You may automate modern web and desktop applications, Excel files, directories, and legacy programs like terminal emulators. Users can use UI components from the application, pictures, or coordinates to communicate with the machine.
Business process flows
Business process flows provide a guide for people to get work done.
They offer a streamlined user experience that guides users through the procedures that have been established by their company for encounters that must be advanced to some resolution.
This user experience can be customized so that users in various security jobs can have an encounter that is most appropriate for their line of work.
Use business process flows to specify a series of steps that people should perform to reach a particular result. People can see where they are in the business process thanks to the visual indicators provided by these steps.
Because new users don’t have to concentrate on which table to use, business process flows lessen the requirement for training. They can follow the process as a guide. When you establish a set of stages and steps for a business process flow, Power Automate shows them in control at the top of the form.
There are several steps in each stage. Each step represents a column for entering data. Using the Next Stage button will take you to the following stage.
You can operate with a business process flow stage inside the stage flyout or pin it to the side pane in the unified interface. Business process flows don’t support mobile devices, and expanding the stage fly out to the side pane is not supported business process flows.
You can make a step mandatory, requiring people to submit information for a related column before moving on to the next step. It’s a “stage-gating” practice.
We advise adding this column to your form if you add a business- or system-required column to a stage of a business process flow.
Because they don’t offer any conditional business logic or automation besides streamlining the data entry process and managing entrance into phases, business process flows seem comparatively straightforward compared to other types of processes.
However, combined with other procedures and adaptations, they can significantly contribute to time savings, lower training costs, and more user adoption.
Power Automate connectors overview
A connector is a proxy or wrapper around an API that enables the communication between the underlying service and Azure Logic Apps, Microsoft Power Apps, and Power Automate. It gives users a tool to link their accounts and use a library of premade actions and triggers to create apps and processes.
Thanks to Microsoft’s extensive network of SaaS connectors, you can link cloud-based apps, data, and devices. Planner, Teams, Power BI, Salesforce, Office 365, Twitter, Dropbox, Google services, and more are a few examples of well-known connectors.
Connector components
Each connector provides a set of actions and triggers. After connecting to the underlying service, users can utilize these actions within their apps and workflows.
Actions. Changes that a user directs are called actions. In a SQL database, for instance, you might use an action to look up, write, update, or remove data. Every action corresponds exactly to an operation listed in the specification.
Triggers. Many connectors have triggers that can alert your app when particular events happen. You can create a flow or a logic app that watches for this trigger and executes a command whenever it fires.
There are two types of triggers:
- Polling Triggers. These triggers contact your service to check for fresh data at predetermined intervals. When fresh data becomes available, your workflow instance is restarted with the new data as input..
- Push Triggers. These triggers wait for an event to happen by monitoring the data on an endpoint. This event triggers a fresh run of your workflow instance.