Power Automate – Tips & Tricks for you
Wouldn't it be nice if you could automate the time-consuming, repetitive tasks you find? If you eliminated your sources of error? What if you could increase data quality and productivity and improve internal communication? Forget “would,” “would,” and “could” – this idea is closer than you might think. In this blog we will show you how to achieve your goal with Power Automate using numerous tips and tricks. Let's start with a short introduction.
What is Power Automate?
Microsoft's Power Platform is a collection of tools for, among other things, analyzing data and creating apps and chatbots. Power Automate is part of this and offers a variety of options and solutions to automate processes.
Power Automate offers over 300 so-called connectors – i.e. interfaces or connections to other systems. This means that Microsoft systems such as Outlook, Teams or SharePoint can be linked with each other. There are also numerous third-party systems such as Salesforce or Twitter to choose from.
The most noticeable difference from other process automation solutions is the graphical interface. No programming knowledge is required to create many flows. The individual steps are strung together using graphical building blocks to carry out the desired tasks.

Graphical interface for flow creation
How do I create a flow in Power Automate?
Before you can start creating the flow, you need to be clear about a few important points. To do this, ask yourself the following questions:
- Objective: What is the goal of the flow?
- scenarios: Which scenarios mainly occur? Are there exceptions? Is it worth automating this?
- Flow type: What triggers the flow?
- Connectors: Which connectors are needed? (Licenses available?)
The scenarios mentioned are particularly important. You can easily waste a lot of time trying to design the flow to cover this one exception that occurs every four years on February 29th. Think carefully about whether this is really worth it.
Now you have created a rough concept of what the flow should look like. So you can get started.
Tip #1: Rename actions
Power Automate assigns a default name for the trigger and each action. Use the option to rename them and give them self-explanatory names. You and your teammates will be grateful later when testing and troubleshooting.

Before and after comparison for labeling actions
Tip #2: Document
At each step, add a short note describing what happens in that action. This can be particularly helpful if you use expressions or trigger conditions that are not visible at first glance.

Document an action with a note
Tip #3: Error handling in Power Automate
Think about where an error could occur in the flow - for example, because data is processed incompletely or in an incorrect format. How should the flow react to this? By default it will abort at this point and not carry out any subsequent actions. Maybe it makes sense for you to handle this by having the flow automatically send an email to you or the support team? Or can the error be ignored and the flow continue with the next step? The Run After Configure setting allows you to control this behavior.

“Run after configure” setting
Tip No. 4: Create order and overview
A flow with a few actions can quickly become confusing. Summarize what belongs together using the Scope action. A scope (or area) is an empty container with no logic that exists solely to create order.

Create order and overview thanks to “areas”
Tip #5. Get help
Sure: No Power Automate master has fallen from the sky yet. It takes some practice to find your way around the wealth of actions, expressions, triggers and connectors. Would you rather not struggle through Microsoft documentation, hundreds of videos and blog posts alone?
We are happy to help you and share our knowledge and experiences with you!
Contact Contact us for a non-binding and free assessment hour in which we will identify your needs together in an interactive meeting and define how we can support you on your way to becoming a Power Automate master.

Our offer around Power Automate