Understanding the Power Automate User Interface

Before you start automating business processes, you need to master the basics! In this clip part of my Power Platform Foundations: Introduction to Power Automate course on Pluralsight, you will learn about the Power Automate User Interface!

Full Power Automate Foundations link

Video Summary

Here are the key points from the transcript:

• ower Automate has three main interfaces: the web-based Maker Portal, Power Automate Desktop for desktop flows, and a mobile app for iOS and Android.
• In the Maker Portal, you can find your flows under “My Flows” with tabs for Cloud flows, Desktop flows, and flows shared with you.
• Clicking on a flow shows details like its name, description, owner, run history, and connectors used. Shared flows move to the “Shared with me” tab.
• You can edit flow properties and the flow itself using the edit buttons. The interface also includes tools like zoom controls and a fit view option.
• The next steps involve creating your own flows, starting with Cloud flows, and exploring features like triggers, actions, and logic controls.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Now that we know the basic terms, let’s get familiar with the Power Automate user interface. Most Power Automate flows are crafted from the Power Automate web interface, which is called the Power Automate Maker Portal, and you can find it at make.powerautomate.com. There is also a desktop tool for desktop flows called Power Automate Desktop, which we will showcase later in this course when we cover desktop flows. Finally, Power Automate also offers a mobile app for both iOS and Android, which allows you to see your flow runs, respond to approvals, and even create or start flows from the mobile app.

Let’s first focus on the Power Automate Maker Portal. Once you go to make.powerautomate.com, if you want to see your flows, you need to go to “My Flows” on the left side navigation. You then have three tabs at the top. The first one is called Cloud Flows, and here is where you will find all of the different cloud flows that you have created and have not shared with anyone. The second tab is for Desktop Flows, which are for robotic process automation. Finally, under the Shared with Me tab, you’ll see all the different flows that you have shared with other people or they have shared with you. It’s important to remember that once you create a cloud flow, work on it for a few days, and then share it with a colleague, it will not show up under Cloud Flows anymore but will be under the Shared with Me tab. This has got me sometimes, as I couldn’t find a flow that I was working on last week but forgot that I shared it with somebody, and now I need to go to the Shared with Me tab to access it.

When clicking on the cloud flow, you will see a ton of details about the flow. First, you will see the basic details about the flow, such as the name, description, owner, type, created and modified dates, and so on. In the middle bottom, you will see the 28-day run history for that flow. You can see how long each flow took to run, and if it succeeded or failed, and you can even click on each one of them to see more details. After that, on the top right, you will see the connections or connectors used, and this can give you a good overview of what services this cloud flow connects to. Right underneath, you will see all the owners of that flow, and under that, you have access to process mining insights, which is a tool that we will cover a bit later in this course. It allows you to optimize business processes. Finally, you have the associated apps, which is a way to manually specify which Power Apps use this flow, providing greater visibility to everyone involved.

Now that we have seen the Power Automate Maker Portal in action, let’s head over to the lab environment and explore the Power Automate user interface. We are now in the lab environment, and let me open up the browser here where I navigated to make.powerautomate.com. You can either navigate using the URL or go to your Office 365 menu and then go to Power Automate, which will bring you to this location. On the Power Automate home screen, a big part of the screen at the top is taken up by Microsoft Copilot for Power Automate. We will talk about it later in this module, but it’s the Microsoft AI assistant to help you create and manage your Power Automate flows. On the homepage, at the bottom, we have some Microsoft Learn material for Power Automate.

One of the most important pages you will go to is “My Flows.” Let me navigate to the tab, and here at the top, I have the three tabs we talked about. First, I have all of my cloud flows, then my desktop flows, and then the shared with me flows. These are all the flows that either I created and shared with somebody or somebody else created and shared with me. Let’s go inside Cloud Flows. You’ll notice that some of them have a little diamond next to them. That is because those flows use a premium connector. As soon as a flow uses a premium connector, you will see that little diamond next to the flow name. The same thing applies to the desktop flows here because they require a license; they have the little diamond next to them. Flows can either be turned on, like the three here at the top, or you can see the three at the bottom here are turned off. They are greyed out a bit and have the little disabled icon at the bottom right.

Let’s focus on some of the flows we have here. As you can see in the icon of the flow, we see what the trigger is. We know that for this one and this one, the trigger is when something happens in SharePoint, whereas this one is on the push of a button, so it’s an instant flow. In the type of flow here, which is my third column, I can see if it’s an automated flow, an instant flow, or a scheduled flow. I don’t have any scheduled flows here, but if I had any, I would see them in the type column. Now let’s go into the first one. We will give it a few seconds to load, but at the top, I will have all my flow details. I can see what the flow name is, the description, who the primary owner is, the status when it was created and modified, the type, and what license plan this flow runs under. Without going too deep into licensing, we can have either per-user licenses or per-flow licenses in Power Automate. This is important to have here, especially for flows that use premium connectors, so you can know whose license or what type of license this flow runs under.

In the middle bottom, I have the 28-day run history. You can see that I have one that started on April 21st, two weeks ago, that took two minutes to complete and completed successfully. Then I have another one that was also started two weeks ago, but it’s been running for 14 days. You can always click on them to see what stage they are on. For example, you can see this one when an item got created is the trigger, and now it’s waiting for approval. So we know where it’s waiting. At the top right, I have all the different connections that this flow is connecting to. These are our connectors. As you can see here, we use the approvals connector, the Office 365 Outlook connector, and the SharePoint connector. Right now, I am the only owner of this flow, which is why it appeared in the Cloud Flows tab.

Then I have my process mining preview. We will talk about process mining towards the end of this course, but it allows me to deep dive into my process and find out if there are any bottlenecks, unnecessary logic, and things like that. At the bottom, I have my associated apps, and right now, I don’t have any associated Power Apps with this flow. If you want to edit the properties of the flow, such as the name and description, you have the edit button over here. If you want to edit the flow itself, the edit button is up here at the top left. Let me click on it, and now I can go edit my flow. In this video, we will only talk about the user interface, and in the next module, we will get our hands dirty and create our own flows. But I wanted to show you that at the top of every flow, we will have our trigger. I can see right now my trigger is when a new item is created in SharePoint. When I click on the trigger, I have the properties that appear on the left, where I can see, for example, in what site and what list this trigger is looking for information. Then I have settings, the code view, and information about this trigger and connector. So you can see all of the properties of the trigger.

On the right side of the screen, you have Copilot, which is the AI assistant always there to help you. But we will close it for now because let’s learn how to do things ourselves before we learn how to use AI to make them better. If you want to zoom in or zoom out, you have controls at the bottom left. You can zoom in, zoom out, and use the fit view option to make the whole flow fit into whatever screen size you have. Remember, my trigger is always at the top, and then I have my actions, such as start and wait for an approval, send an email that the purchase was approved, or send an email that the purchase was denied. I can also have logic controls, such as a condition.

Now let’s go back to “My Flows.” I have the back button, and always remember, if you change anything, make sure you save it before you leave. Let’s go back to the menu. I also have a tab for approvals. If there are any approvals waiting for us, we can go there and see what approvals are waiting. We have process mining, which we will cover later in this course. We have all our different connections here on the left as well. If I go under connections, I will see the different services that I’m currently connected to. This is it for a high-level view of the Power Automate user interface. Remember, this is the Power Automate Maker Portal, where we mostly go to deal with cloud flows and business process flows. Now that we know the interface, it’s time for us to create our own flows. We will learn to create all types of flows in this course, starting with cloud flows in the next module.