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What is Power Automate?
Power Automate is a service that helps you create automated workflows between your favourite apps and services to synchronise files, get notifications, collect data, and more.
Anyone – from a basic business user to an IT professional – can create automated processes using Power Automate’s no-code/low-code platform, so it truly is accessible to all.
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Turn Outdated into Automated
Automate quickly and more securely
Empower everyone to build automated processes using low-code, drag-and-drop tools. With hundreds of pre-built connectors, thousands of templates, and AI assistance, it’s easy to automate repetitive tasks.
Boost efficiency
Record and visualise end-to-end processes using process and task mining with process advisor. It takes the guesswork out of what to automate by providing guided recommendations for creating flows.
Enhance workflows with AI
Make your automations even smarter using AI Builder. Quickly process forms using document automation, plus process approvals, detect images and text, or create with prebuilt models.
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Get started with flows
1. Flows are the building blocks to automating workflows in Power Automate. To start streamlining your organisation’s processes, flows help you minimise repetitive, manual, and time-consuming tasks – creating more time for you to focus on strategic work. Within Power Automate, there are three different types of flows: cloud flows, desktop flows, and business processes flows.
2. Cloud flows allow you to automate workflows between modern (API) cloud-based services. Using digital process automation (DPA), cloud flows empower anyone to build robust automation with hundreds of connectors. Create cloud flows with ease using the logic-based designer and see your automations come alive.
3. There are also thousands of pre-built templates for cloud flows available in Power Automate. Start automating quickly by connecting between popular first and third-party cloud apps and services through a simple search or exploring different categories.
4. Desktop flows allow you to automate workflows between modern (API) cloud-based services and legacy (non-API) systems. Using robotic process automation (RPA), desktop flows enable anyone to automate the user interface (UI) of a desktop using an intuitive, drag-and-drop visual designer with hundreds of pre-built actions. Users can even take advantage of the desktop and web recorders to capture their actions, such as mouse clicks and keyboard inputs, and seamlessly import those steps into the visual designer.
5. When you select the desktop or web recorder, a pop-up appears that will capture your actions with UI elements in real-time. Once you are done, simply click “done” and your recorded actions transfer into the visual designer.
6. Any of the desktop flows you create can be run manually, triggered to run on a schedule, or from within a cloud flow as seen here. By triggering desktop flows within your cloud flows, you expand the possibilities of automation across your organisation.
7. Business process flows allow you to automate multistep, guided processes, ensuring consistency and taking out the boring part such as notifying the right stakeholders to approve a step, or keeping track of past decisions. In conjunction with Microsoft Power Apps, create an automated visual, guided experience for users – so your organisation can achieve desired outcomes.
Enhance your flows
1. AI Builder adds intelligence to your flows. This turnkey solution brings the power of Microsoft AI through a point-and-click experience, helping you improve business performance.
2. With AI Builder, you can build, train, and publish AI models without a single line of code or requiring data science skills. Create bottom-up innovation by empowering everyone in your organisation to bring together automation and AI.
3. Document automation is just one of the popular AI solutions built on AI Builder and the Power Platform. Organisations can accelerate and optimise the processing of documents to free humans from repetitive, low value, and error-prone tasks. A popular example of document automation involves purchase ledger, where the invoicing and payment process can be streamlined and automated to help save time and resources.
4. Process advisor helps take the guesswork out of automation by letting you record your business processes to help identify bottlenecks and ways you can optimise them. Record on your own or invite others to collaborate. Then watch your recordings turn into end-to-end visualisations and in-depth analytics that help show you opportunities to improve your process.
5. Process advisor also provides automation recommendations for which cloud flow connectors to use to begin improving your process.
Run your flows
1. Power Automate online is a centralised hub for everything Power Automate. Access flows, data, analytics, AI Builder, process advisor, and more.
2. Power Automate Desktop lets you create and edit desktop flows. This application bridges modern and legacy systems using no-code robotic process automation (RPA) tools to automate tasks and processes across the desktop and web.
3. The Power Automate app in Microsoft Teams puts automation in the hub for teamwork. Create and manage cloud flows and business process flows without leaving Teams, using a variety of pre-built templates or starting from scratch.
