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Triggers and Actions: Your First Flow

First lesson of the Power Automate: Automate Your Tasks course, free to read: about 15 minutes, 3 exercises and 3 quiz questions. This is the catalogue's base lesson; in the student space, it is rewritten for your profile.

Objectives

  • Distinguish the types of Power Automate flows
  • Build a flow with a trigger, actions and dynamic content
  • Test a flow and read its run history

Cloud flowsTriggersActions and connectorsDynamic content

What is Power Automate for?

Power Automate is the automation service of Microsoft’s Power Platform. It chains tasks between applications without writing a program: save the attachments of an email to a folder, send a reminder every Monday, ask a manager for approval, copy an Excel row into a SharePoint list.

You build automations in the make.powerautomate.com portal. They are called flows. This course is about cloud flows, which run on Microsoft’s servers. There are also desktop flows (Power Automate Desktop), which drive the applications on a Windows computer as a user would (RPA), and business process flows, which guide a user through the steps of a process in an application.

Trigger and actions

A cloud flow reads from top to bottom:

  1. a single trigger, which starts the flow;
  2. actions, run in order, each of which can use the result of the previous ones.

Depending on its trigger, a flow is:

Type Starts… Example trigger
Automated when an event occurs When a new email arrives (V3) (Outlook)
Instant when someone presses a button Manually trigger a flow
Scheduled at regular intervals Recurrence

Each trigger and each action belongs to a connector: Office 365 Outlook, OneDrive for Business, Excel Online (Business), SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Approvals… On first use, Power Automate creates a connection with your account: the flow will act with your permissions. Some so-called premium connectors are only available depending on your organization’s license.

Dynamic content and expressions

When you fill in an action field, the Dynamic content pane offers the outputs of the previous steps: the subject of the received email, the name of the created file, the value entered at start. You insert them like tags; at run time, they are replaced by the real values.

The Expression tab (fx icon) lets you calculate a value with functions. Function names are in English and arguments are separated by commas:

formatDateTime(convertTimeZone(utcNow(), 'UTC', 'Romance Standard Time'), 'dd/MM/yyyy')

utcNow() returns the current date and time in universal time; convertTimeZone converts it to the Paris time zone (Romance Standard Time); formatDateTime formats it as day/month/year. Watch the case of the format: MM stands for the month, mm for the minutes.

Build, test, diagnose

Typical approach for an instant flow:

  1. Create > Instant cloud flow, name it and choose Manually trigger a flow.
  2. In the trigger, Add an input of type text, for example Sujet.
  3. Add the Compose action (data operations) to calculate today’s date with the expression above.
  4. Add Send an email (V2) and build the subject with the Sujet dynamic content and the output of Compose.
  5. Save, then Test > Manually.

After each run, the run history (the flow’s details page) shows the status: Succeeded, Failed, Running. Open a run: each step is ticked in green or marked in red, and you can expand its real inputs and outputs. This is the main diagnostic tool.

Good habits from the start

  • Rename actions (“Date du jour” rather than “Compose 2”): expressions refer to them by name.
  • A flow runs with its owner’s connections: don’t send emails on behalf of a colleague without their knowledge.
  • Turn off a flow that is under development rather than letting it trigger on real data.

Exercises

Solutions and tests stay on the server. In the student space, your code is run and checked, and the tutor gives hints before the solution.

  1. TaskDifficulty 12 hints

    Your first instant flow

    Environment: use the Microsoft 365 account and the Power Automate environment provided by the course (make.powerautomate.com). The available connectors depend on your organization’s license. Replace vous@entreprise.example with your own work address.

    1. Create an instant cloud flow named Rappel du jour, trigger Manually trigger a flow.
    2. Add a text input Sujet.
    3. Add a Compose action renamed Date du jour, with the expression formatDateTime(convertTimeZone(utcNow(), 'UTC', 'Romance Standard Time'), 'dd/MM/yyyy').
    4. Add Send an email (V2) to your address, subject Rappel : followed by the Sujet dynamic content, -, then the output of Date du jour.
    5. Save, test manually by entering Réunion budget, then open the run in the history.
    • The flow has one trigger and two actions, one of them named Date du jour
    • The run has the Succeeded status and each step is ticked in green
    • The email received has the subject "Rappel : Réunion budget - " followed by today's date in dd/mm/yyyy format
    • The output of Date du jour, visible in the history, is today's date in Paris

  2. TaskDifficulty 12 hints

    A scheduled flow

    Environment: use the Microsoft 365 account and the Power Automate environment provided by the course (make.powerautomate.com). The available connectors depend on your organization’s license. Replace vous@entreprise.example with your own work address.

    1. Create a scheduled cloud flow named Point du lundi: repeat every 1 week, on Monday at 08:00, time zone (UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris.
    2. Add Send an email (V2) to your address, subject Point hebdomadaire, body Pensez à mettre à jour le suivi des factures.
    3. Save, then test the flow manually once.
    4. Open the trigger settings and note the date of the next planned run.
    • The recurrence is set to 1 week, Monday, 8 a.m., Paris time zone
    • The manual test produces a successful run and a "Point hebdomadaire" email
    • The flow stays turned on for the next Mondays

  3. Multiple choiceDifficulty 11 hint

    Choose the trigger

    You want a flow to run every time a file is dropped into a OneDrive folder. What type of flow is this?

    • Instant
    • Scheduled
    • Automated
    • Desktop flow

End-of-lesson quiz

  1. How many triggers does a cloud flow have?

    • Only one
    • At least two
    • As many as actions

  2. What does utcNow() return?

    • The current date and time in universal time (UTC)
    • Paris time
    • The flow's creation date

  3. Where can you see the real inputs and outputs of each step of a run?

    • In the flow's run history
    • In Outlook
    • In the connector settings

The rest of the course

  1. Emails, Files and Approvals20 min
  2. Conditions, Loops, Variables and Expressions20 min
  3. Excel and SharePoint Connectors20 min
  4. Error Handling and Best Practices20 min
Build my pathSee the full syllabus

Power Automate: Automate Your Tasks · Beginner · 1 h 35 min