An Introduction to Cloud Flows with Examples in 2024 | Power Automate

hello people of YouTube I guess you're here because you want to learn about power ultimate well I've got the video for you I'm going to go through all of the different types of power automate flows that you can make the examples that I'm going to use are going to take you through automated flows it's going to take you through scheduled flows it's going to take you through manual flows and just exactly what you can do with parate I'm going to give you an overview of the site in front of you as well as well as co-pilot and then we're going to touch on what you can actually do with power automate in terms of connecting to third parties that are not currently supported by Microsoft directly or by the community as well as how you can actually contribute to the community yourself but firstly let's start on the website well this is the website that you're going to face when you first log into Power ultimate now you might be thinking well that's great but I don't have an account where do I get an account do I have to pay for it you don't actually have to pay for it especially if you're one learning or two just wanting to look at what's going on with power timate so if you're a business and you're looking to see if power automate features are for you you can also do this method as well and that method is signing up for a developer account now signing up for a developer account is really easy I'm going to leave a link in the description below and what that will enable you to do is have an account where you can create and use premium features of power automate as well as all the core features of power automate you can use power apps and so on as well as data verse Etc um and you'll get a real good feel of the Power Platform because it is a Power Platform developer account now um once you've created that account and you sign into make. powermate.com this is where you will land and you'll see this little notification at top saying this is a developer environment is not for meant for production use now this is very important because you cannot do production stuff on this this is just for learning purposes or trial purposes and as well it's a very great way to learn it's a very if you're look if you're a consultant for example or you're a developer looking to move into the Power Platform this is going to be the best way for you to learn because you're going to learn by doing and by doing you're going to learn what the differences are from where you're coming from to where you're wanting to go so that's an overview of that let's actually go through the site then well once you're on here you'll see this big notification at the top saying this automate something what should it do and this is co-pilot if you start uh here you click on one of these examples or you describe the type of flow that you want and click generate you'll get an example of that and you can iterate through that example and actually create a flow using co-pilot just like GitHub co-pilot and all of those different types of co-pilots you can actually use co-pilots to make par automate flows Cloud flows but you don't want to do that when you're first starting out because you won't understand what's going on once it's been made you won't understand what a trigger is what an action is so it's very important that I cover those in this video as well so that you know um exactly where to start so on the left hand side here we've got a navigation bar you've got home where we are now you've got create and in create you're going to be able to make your flows then you've got templates and in templates you're going to have loads and loads and loads of different examples that you can just click on see how they're built see how they're designed see some best practices and see if there's anything that you are actually already trying to do a flow may already be made for you for example if you're trying to move a file from one folder in one drive to another folder there may already be a flow in the template for you then you've got the learn section which will take you to the Microsoft doc section and that's going to um allow you to uh learn there um but I do recommend you looking in the community for the Power Platform such as my own blog flowjo doio it has a lot of information and in-depth guides about the functions of power ultimate um what the differences are between power effects and power ultimate all of that type of stuff uh that you're going to need to know and understand as well as I go through like big examples of like complex Solutions and stuff like that that you may not get from the learning material then you've got the my flow section now my flow section is where any flow that you click on and create here will appear in your my flow section there is a section for cloud flows desktop flows and shared with me Cloud flows are obviously what we're on now this is a cloudflow website um desktop flows that is an RPA method we're not going to be be touching on that it's part of power automate but it is a different type of skill set and then you've got shared with me now the shared with me section if someone has created a flow and they've shared it with you that's where it's going to appear and then you can both work on that flow or you can make modifications to someone else's flow if they need it but things aren't as simple as they seem because flows don't always just exist in my flows flows also exist in Solutions now what is a solution if you're not familiar with the Power Platform a solution is like a box let's say you've got an open box you can put all of your Flows In so you've got a nice um box of all of your flows that you can package up and send to another environment or you could move um to wherever you want you could back it up or or or so on but there's two types of solutions there's unmanaged and managed unmanaged means that the Box is open people can go in and they can change it manage means the box is closed they can't actually modify those flows so it's important to understand these I'm not going to get into too much detail but essentially you're going to want to really work in Solutions you're not really going to want to work in my flows unless you're specifically doing something for an environment and you're not going through a development process of going from a Dev environment to uat to test to wherever you're trying to go to so what you're then going to want to do is you'll want to go to create a solution for flows and then you're going to create your flow in the solution the reason why is you can actually create flows here and it will appear in my flows and then you can add them to a solution but sometimes depending on the trigger you may not be able to add them to the solution because they will not be solution aware so it's very important and I would definitely recommend working out of a solution but for the purpose of this video and just going through all of the different types of flows we're just going to focus on the my flow section okay so let's go into create them so if we go into create you've got the templates as I mentioned previously you've got them down here so like you've got remote work email and all that type of stuff you can select one here just start with that or alternatively you can actually go into automate Cloud flow instant Cloud flow and schedule Cloud flow now what are the differences between this isn't a scheduled an automation well technically it is but it's on a schedule and they are considered separate things in power automate automated is designed based on an event happening so let's say you're in data verse it's a uh it's a database and we add a new row of information that could trigger a flow and in turn we could then manipulate that data and that would be considered an automated Cloud flow an instant Cloud flow would require someone to manually have an interaction let's say you're on a power app you've got a button and you want to trigger something and have the automation run in the background you could have power automate do that and as long as it's a manual you will then press the button and it's not going to be automated Based on data and it's not going to be scheduled and then obviously scheduling is then when youve got a set time date reoccurrence whatever you you've got some kind of like um date or time that you want something to run and then it's going to run or each week each day each minute uh Etc so those are the three we're going to be focusing on there are three others there is describe it and design it that's kind of like the AI way of doing stuff you've got desktop flows again that's RPA that's kind of um outside the scope of this video and then you've got process mining which is also outside the scope of this video so we're going to be focusing on these three so if I'm going to go into my flows I've actually got free created and I'm going to start with the schedule example so if I click onto this you land on a page where you see information about the flow you've got the name you've got the owner you've got when it was created you've got history of flow runs um you've got the owners on the right hand side that you can modify so you can add new owners you've got connections that you can add and modify and um you can basically just see an overview of your flow as you can see here I've done several tests I've got some failures I've got some successes and this is where you're going to see the success and failure runs of your flow it's very important because if you've got a lot of failures then you're going to want to modify your flow and fix those failures but then if you click on edit up the top here you'll be presented with this view now co-pilot opens on the right hand side and you can ask it questions if you've got any queries and it's there to help you but this only opens on the new designer and this is the new designer if you see up the top right there it says new designer and it's got a blue um coloring on the background that is because the new designer is Select and by default this is the one that's going to open and this is the one that you're going to want to learn because this is power ultimate going forward so we've got a recurrence and list rows what are these two things the recurrence is the trigger the first item in a flow is always the trigger and you need this because the trigger is what's going to start your flow it's what's going to trigger your flow so here I've got an interval of one I've got a frequency of day um and then it's going to essentially run once a day so when I click on this it opens up this pane on the left hand side which is all of the parameters that I need to fill out anyone with a red uh star next to it is a required item so I need to do that and as you can see here and the preview it says runs every day so if I change that it's going to then run every month run every year like all of that type of stuff you can select from here if you go to settings you've got more um different settings that you can like trigger conditions and stuff like that I'm not going to get into that but essentially you can add conditions on triggers you got the code View and see what the actual um Json code is on the background and then you've got about as well so what's happening then is every day this flow will run and it will call the next action because once this runs it then moves on to the next one it's procedural so the first one happens s then the next one happens then the next one happens but what you can do is you can add a parallel branch and what that will do then is it will add another Branch here so both of these branches will be running simultaneously so you can do things concurrently um in parallelization or you can just do it in an individual flow so now we've got a trigger and then we've got an action so this action called list rows is going to a data base and pull in information I'm looking here and I'm like okay well I've clicked on it I've got some parameters it says table name what does this mean what this means is I can select any table in data verse of which there are many and I can create many more so I've selected a cat's table and then I can select the parameters what I'm doing is I'm actually filtering rows so I'm saying created on is great greater or equal to today's date so if there is any items in there that are created on um or with a greater or equal than today's date then bring back that information so essentially we've got a trigger once that trigger occurs it then goes onto the actions and I can have loads of different actions if I click on plus here add an action you can see there is literally hundreds of different things that you can do and you can filter that even further let's say data verse so if I go into Data verse here I've got um upload a file image delete a row get information I can click see more and then I can see all of the different uh actions that I've got for data verse this allows you to um be very flexible with what you're trying to do with your automation as well as Focus specifically on what you're wanting to do so if you're working with dataverse you can then do your dataverse actions if you're working with SharePoint SharePoint actions one drive one drive actions and so on and it allows you to focus and manipulate and change data change files all of that type of stuff all of that automation very easily just by doing an action so an action is doing something trigger starting something action doing okay so we've seen the schedule flow example let's actually run this and see what happens when we run it then so if I run this test uh okay so instantly run recurrence run list rows run and then if I click here it's going to show me all of this information it's going to show me that it succeeded Etc and then if I click on show raw outputs I can actually get all of the information and if you see this value section down here this are the values that are returned so I'm getting back a cat named Joe okay well that must have been created today then so if I see created on it was actually created today like it was created the next day because I've got a filter saying okay well um on the 3rd of January I want to see any items that were created on the first of January or greater than but because this was created on the 4th of January then it's going to bring back that item so if I actually go to dat data verse now you can see I've got a cats table I've got a Joe uh person added uh to the cats um and you can see that it was added but because the date here is captured in PST whereas the date here uh on the output if I go to the created on Section um is actually created uh captured in UTC so it's saying well it's the fourth in UTC is actually the third at 4:58 p.m. but it still applies the same because we are looking for a time in UTC we actually filtered based on UTC if you remember I've done the UTC time that anytime at UTC uh on the third onwards we have filtered created on so that is actions that is triggers that is filtering and that is retrieving information back um simply using a schedule now this will run every day and it will do this flow every day unless I turn it off but as you've seen here this is the new designer what does this look like in the old designer if I click this button up here it will ask me if I want to save so I do save and switch and now it's switched um you can see that it's much bigger it's much clunkier and it's much less user friendly now why is it less user friendly that's because it doesn't have all of the information if you're working on a large flow with lots of items you can see how big these are if there's like five rows you're not going to see much at all when you click on something it doesn't open in the left hand side everything is in this box and it opens up and the window goes on and on and on um if you want to go to settings you've got to press this button you've then got to click settings it then opens up settings You' got to modify that close it and again in the new designer it's just all in the left hand column and it's a lot easier to use is a lot more user friendly but the important thing is that all of the information is exactly the same it's exactly the same like you you can see I've got created on it's greater than or equal to um the third of the 1 uh midnight everything I've done in the new designer is exactly the same done here it's just it's a much more better user interface so that you can make and create bigger flows much more easily and actually see the data much more easily now why is this important then why would anyone want to use the old one well a lot of the content that I've created many other people have created is based on this old view but what's important to remember is that that doesn't matter because all of the information is the same it just looks slightly different now so if you're if you've become a consultant and you're looking for a way to um add a day to a date you may see it in the old designer but you can replicate that really easily by simply clicking on the action that they're using and doing it on the left hand column okay so that is the schedule example and that is how you can use scheduling to automate processes for your business or for your customer let's go back to my flows and look at the automated example then now as I mentioned previously I added Joe to that cat's table and what that's done is that triggered this flow because what I've got here is I've got a trigger now based on a data verse table so I've got the change type is added and there are multiple ways I can do that I could do added or deleted added or modified added or modified or deleted those are different types I could do but I just wanted it when a row is added and then I've got a table of cats so I'm targeting the table again I can just select whatever table I want to Target as we did with our list rows you can do it with your trigger so I'm targeting the cats and I'm doing the scope of organization there's multiple different Scopes you can do it based on user business or organization and again you can add parameters Etc um this is basically going to trigger when a row is added to the cat's table and you can see that here so when a row is added to the cat's table based on the organization run this flow so whenever a row is added to the cats table this flow will run and why is that important then well let's say you're adding a load of contacts let say you're adding a load of customers all of this type of stuff that you may be adding you may be wanting to change it you may be wanting to send them an email you may be wanting to do something automatically well power automate allows you to do this it enables you to be able to do this and you can do it all in the background by a simple flow and a simple trigger that is based on when something is added now maybe when you're updating something you want to send a reminder email you can change it to modified or if you want to send a goodbye email based on deleted um and then we've got a compose action so we've got a trigger again and then we've got an action so the action is doing the trigger is starting the action here I've got a concap now what does this mean well I've got functions so here if you click on here you can see the lightning bolt which is dynamic data so any outputs from um the above so when a row is added or modified on the cat's um table you can see I can get the color of the cat I can get the ID I can get the name I can get the origin all of that type of stuff but I can actually write functions as well now what are functions functions allow you to manipulate data you can do math you can combine Bine um text together and that's what we're going to do you can check if something contains something all of that type of stuff you can do with functions but it looks complex but it really isn't if you click on the concat I've just wrote concat which is essentially concatenating I'm adding two strings together I'm adding a um two things together to make a sentence and all I'm doing here is I'm writing the name of the cat is space and then I'm passing in the column from the trigger so that's the name column so what that's doing then is when I add a row so if I go on here now and I click add new row and I say flowjo if I click off of here you can see um it's now saved and data saved so my flow is going to run it's going to come into this name column it's going to grab the flow Joe and then it's going to add it to to that sentence in that compose action so if I come back to par automate here and I press back so as you can see here um it's running and then 4 seconds ago it's run so it was just waiting for it to trigger the flow triggered uh it's got the name flowjo and then what's happened is I've actually combined some random text that I decided to have uh which was the name of the cat is flojo so now I've got that and then what I could do is I could update a another table in data verse I could send an email saying the name of the cat is flowjo to a customer or whatever or anything like that um and you can see how you can automate stuff Based on data entry based on file modifications based on anything like that you can automate the process and that is how easy it is to automate in power automate um based on changes so we've seen scheduling and we've seen changes now let's take a look at manual now in manual what's really important is that we've got a manual flow example it's that someone has to manually trigger it now what do I mean by this well essentially manually triggering a flow as you can see we're in the old designer again um when you want to trigger a flow ually you have to press a button for it to start if you don't it's not going to automatically start Based on data changes it's not going to start based on like scheduling it's going to only be done based on user input now this is important because let's say you're working with power apps you've created an application that's got a big button that says submit now you may want to submit information to a third party website so you may want to pass that information to power ultimate have the flow run and send that information to a third-party website and then that third party website has it and then you can finish doing whatever you need to do in your flow so it's important to have the ability to do manual triggers of flows because they are only done when are they are required so it's based on user input but as I mentioned previously you um can essentially go to third parties right so I've actually created a um a third party let's switch to the other designer because this is a lot easier to see so you can see I've got classic league standings here and I've got a league ID so what this is actually doing is it's actually going to the Fantasy Premier League which is a third party no association to Microsoft no association to myself and I've got a Power Platform League that um over 28 people are currently playing in and I can retrieve that information based on API calls because everything in power automate is an API call these actions are calling apis they're doing something they're doing manipulation of data by calling apis it's an an action is an API trigger is an API and you can actually make your own API calls so what I've done is I've actually created a custom action that will retrieve all the information on this page for my league and bring it back so let's say we had a Microsoft teams Channel with all of us in it and we was having a discussion about it I could collect all of that information create a HTML table out of it and then paste it into the channel now this is using a third party as an example now why would I want to do that well let's say you are a customer and you want to uh retrieve some information from a third party website because you have been working with that third party for a long time but Microsoft currently doesn't support it the third party has an API you can actually create what is called a custom connector but if you are feeling generous what you can actually do as well is you can actually add that custom connector for that third party into Microsoft via GitHub so then you can have um what is called an independent publisher such as myself I've actually submitted this API um action to uh Microsoft and they've then published that for everyone to have access to so then individuals can go through and use your custom connector to connect to that third party so what I'm doing then is I'm actually going to a third party and then bringing back that information passing it into HTML table and this only runs when I manually do it so let's actually see this in action so if I hit test here and I hit run flow and done you see instantly it's gone to a third party brought back the information and it's storing it in a HTML table and you can see the table here with all of the information now let's take a look on here the first person is Thomas and let's come into here and then let click on show outputs now it doesn't really show me much information and this is the difference between the new designer and the old designer is if I go back to the old designer now and I run this um again I actually get a preview of the HTML table and obviously the new designer is new and I'm sure that um they're going to be updating a new designer uh over time but you can see here that Thomas is the first one and it's actually created a HTML table for me it's generated all of that information for me just based on the information that's passed in so that is how easy it is to um actually work with manual uh inputs as well so Manual triggering of flows we've seen scheduling we've seen automated and we've seen manual now um but what we can also do once you've understood this you've understood let's have a recap we've understood triggers we've understood actions we've understood automated flows we've understood scheduled flows we've understood manual flows we've seen filtering of data we've seen filtered data be pulled back we've seen data be pulled back we've seen manipulation of data by concatenating some information with some Dynamic data that we've pulled from um an actual uh database and we've seen us connector third parties which you could do with creating custom connectors and lastly I just want to touch on um this which is the co-pilot uh so like I said before I don't recommend you starting here until you've really like gone through some templates and understand the actual structure flows but let's say you want to um every month copy uh all files from one you just basically click on it and it starts generating it for you if you don't like it you can click show different suggestions and it will iterate through it you then click next and you start going through the whole process and you can use co-pilot to actually generate your content for you and then you can manipulate um a already partially built flow for you if it's not already done so um and it's not to the Quality that you want it to you can actually modify that so it's really easy to go through and actually create automated flows Cloud flows and I hope that if you are looking to expand your career and actually work in power timate I hope this has give you a good starting point of the overview of power me and what it can actually do and the different types of things that it can do but if you're actually a business and you're looking to see if this is for you I hope that it actually gives you an oversight of what it can actually achieve for your business and the ROI potential there for actually saving so much time and effort by just simply automating processes really easy we're really easy to understand visuals and code uh that pretty much anyone can pick up and there is so much learning content out there check out my site flowj jo. has so much this YouTube channel has so much content on functions as well so if you're getting scared of all of that um code esque type of uh stuff that you saw with the concat I actually go through every single one on there break it down in really easy terms and you can learn from that but thank you so much if you're still with me to the end of this video like And subscribe to help the channel grow and if you have any questions or comments leave them below and I'll get back to you as soon as possible see you

Channel: FlowJoe

Views: 4,348

Keywords: Power Automate 2024, Cloud Flow, Automated Workflows, Manual Flows, Scheduled Flows, Third-Party Integration, Database Triggers, New Designer Power Automate, Old Designer Power Automate, Copilot for Power Automate, Microsoft Power Platform, Power Apps, Microsoft 365, Workflow Management, Business Efficiency, Automation Tools, Power Automate Tutorial, Power Platform Integration, Cloud-Based Automation, Microsoft Flow, AI-Powered Automation, Examples, Cloud Flow Examples

Id: tqAE7C_hNAI

Length: 32min 6sec (1926 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2024