Microsoft Power Automate: How to get started

Often with a service like Power Automate, you get a bit of the writer’s “staring at a blank page” syndrome, where you don’t even know where to begin. What’s even possible? Fortunately, Microsoft offers templates that show a bunch of a different possibilities: surf over to its templates gallery to get a sense of what you can do, from saving email attachments in a SharePoint library to recording form responses from a Google Sheet (yes, really!).

But the templates are just a starting point. You’ll want to write something customized for your own workflows, I’m sure. Before we dive into building automations (or “flows” as they’re called in Power Automate), let’s get comfortable with what we’re working with.

Think of Power Automate as your personal digital assistant that can work across your applications. There are three main types of automation you can create:

• Cloud flows are like having an assistant in the cloud, constantly watching for things to happen in your online apps like Outlook, SharePoint, or Teams. There are actually three types of these cloud flows: automated, instant, and scheduled, which do about what you think they’d do.
• Desktop flows are like having someone sit at your computer, clicking and typing for you in desktop applications like Excel or specialized business software.
• Business process flows are more like having a guide that walks you through complex procedures step by step, ensuring nothing gets missed.

Each type serves a different purpose, and you’ll likely use a combination of them as you become more comfortable with automation.

Let me walk you through setting up Power Automate for the first time. The process is straightforward, but there are a few important details to pay attention to.

First, open your web browser and go to microsoft365.com. If you’re not already signed in, use your work email and password. You’ll know you’re in the right place when you see the Microsoft 365 app launcher (a square icon with nine dots) in the top left corner.

Click the app launcher; this opens a panel showing all your available Microsoft 365 apps. Don’t worry if you don’t see Power Automate right away — scroll down and look for it. The icon looks like a multicolored right arrow. If you don’t see it, use the search bar at the top of the app launcher pane.

Click on Power Automate to open it. The first time you open it, you might see a brief tutorial. Feel free to go through it or click Skip if you prefer to dive right in. When the whole app opens, you’ll see a welcome screen with templates and suggestions.

Your first automation: Email filing

You probably noticed in the previous screenshot that Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI tool, is now integrated with Power Automate. That means you can describe an automation you’d like to create in natural language, and Power Automate will generate a flow based on your prompt. But Copilot isn’t available to all Power Automate users, and it’s helpful for everyone to know how to build a flow from scratch; that’ll make it easier to adjust and improve any AI-generated flows.

So, let’s start with something everyone needs: automatically organizing emails. Let’s assume you’re in charge of receiving applications for something at work — maybe it is an internship, or perhaps you’re running a scholarship program and you are managing the entries. I’ll show you how to create a flow that stores files attached to emails in SharePoint and tracks them in a neat, centralized list. This is a perfect first flow because it’s both useful and teaches several important concepts.

From the Power Automate home page, look for the button in the left navigation bar labeled Create and click it. (You can alternatively click My flows first, then look for the New flow button up top.)

You’ll see several options. For this flow, we want the whole automation to run without us having to start it, so select Automated cloud flow.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

This opens the flow creation wizard. Name your flow Scholarship Applications.

Next, you choose a trigger, which is the event that will start your flow. In the trigger search box, type Outlook new email and select When a new email arrives. You will be able to add conditions to make it more specific later.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Click Create to continue. The trigger appears in the middle of a blank canvas in Power Automate.

Next, we add steps. The flow executes one step at a time, and each step is an action that the flow will perform once triggered. But first we need to configure the start of our sequence and add a couple of parameters so we can nail down which types of emails we’re looking for and what about them we want Power Automate to do.

Click the When a new email arrives trigger and look at the parameters tab. You’ll want to add four important advanced parameters, which you’ll be able to see in the window by clicking Show all.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

You want to add the following:

• Include Attachments: set to Yes
• Subject Filter: type in Scholarship application
• Folder: set to Inbox (click the folder icon and select Inbox from the pop-up menu)

Then just click back over on the canvas area to save those changes.

Let’s keep adding actions. Click the + sign below your “When a new email arrives” trigger, and the “Add an action” pane appears.

Let’s add our new action by searching for Create item. It will have the SharePoint logo attached to it to let you know it’s related to SharePoint Online. Click on Create item to add it to your canvas.

Now you can configure the action a little more granularly. You need to give the SharePoint Create item action a couple of parameters, because otherwise it won’t know what SharePoint site you want to use for this flow, nor will it know which list to use and augment as new emails and attachments arrive.

Go ahead and select the SharePoint site you want to use, and then select the list you want for this flow. You might need to go over to your SharePoint site first and create a new list for use with this flow; once you do, it should appear in a drop-down list automatically when you click the List Name field. (It may take a few minutes to show up.) You’ll also want to add a text column in your SharePoint list called “Message Content” — this is where the automation will store the body of the email message for you.

You’ll also want to add a couple of advanced parameters to your Create item action:

• Click Show all to show the choices.
• Under Limit Columns by View, select All Items.
• Under Title, type / (slash) and select Insert dynamic content from the pop-up menu. On the pane that appears to the right, select From under “When a new email arrives.”
• Under Message Content, type / and select Insert dynamic content, then select either Body or Body Preview under the Outlook “When a new email arrives” list in the pane on the right. (Body Preview might not be immediately visible. To find it, type body in the search box up top and it will appear among the options.)
• Under “Content type Id,” select Item.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Click the canvas to close the parameters screen and save your changes.

Next, we need to add a condition. A condition affects the behavior of an action when another factor is true or false. In this case, we want the condition to say that the next two actions have output from the previous action applied to them — specifically, we want the attachment from the new email received to be applied to each of our next two subsequent actions.

Click the + sign under the Create item action. On the “Add an action” screen, search for apply to each and then click the Apply to each option that comes up under Control.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

In the “Select an output from previous steps” field, type / and select Insert dynamic content, then select Attachments to the right. This tells Power Automate to use the attachment for each of the next actions it’s going to take.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Click on the canvas to save the “Apply to each” control. At this point, your flow should look like the figure below.

Next, click the + sign below the “Apply to each” action and add another action. (This ought to be a pretty familiar routine for you at this point.)

Here, we need to get the attachment — but we need to use the Outlook “Get Attachment” and NOT the SharePoint “Get attachments.” This is a key distinction. So when you search for get attachment, make sure to pick the one in the Outlook subsection.

Then, in the parameters section, hit / and choose Insert dynamic content in each field, and add Message Id to the Message Id field and Attachments Attachment ID to the “Attachement [sic] Id” field. Both of these items are under the Outlook “When a new email arrives” list in the pane that appears on the right, but they might not be immediately visible. To find them, type the first few letters of each in the search box up top and choose the item from the list that appears.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Click back on the canvas when you’re done to save your changes.

Now, for the final action, click the plus sign below the Get Attachment item, search for add attachment, and choose Add attachment from the SharePoint list. Here, you need to add parameters again, which you should be getting used to as well. You’ll want to add:

• Site Address: pick your SharePoint site.
• List Name: pick the SharePoint list.
• Id: hit the / key, choose dynamic content, and select ID from the SharePoint list.
• File Name: hit the / key, choose dynamic content, and then choose Attachments Name from the Outlook list.
• File Content: hit the / key, choose dynamic content, and then choose either Content Bytes or Attachments Content from the Outlook list.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Finally, click Save in the top right of the overall Power Automate window to keep the flow saved in your account. The final flow should look like this:

Your flow is now ready to test. Use the Test button to try it out. You’ll be asked how you want to test — select Manual, and then send yourself an email with an attachment and put “scholarship application” in the subject line. The flow will report back to you onscreen and show you how long it took to process and what happened at each step.

Note: you may receive errors about a duplicate filename. This relates to the fact we’re not trying to rename individual attachment names when we save them into SharePoint, so if you get a bunch of PDFs from different individuals all called “application” or something similar, Power Automate is telling you the names are duplicated and it isn’t renaming them. This is fine for our purposes, since we are saving the attachments to individual list items, so we’ll always know who they’re from regardless of the filename.

Other errors may result from how your specific Microsoft 365 tenant is configured, but you can often find a workaround. For example, using the Body item in the Message Content field in this flow works fine in my tenant, but when my editor tested it in her tenant, the flow failed, flagging ‘item/MessageContent’ as the source of the error. When she substituted Body Preview in that field, the flow ran flawlessly. So if you hit an error when you start building your own flows, it’s worth looking for a similar item you can substitute.

You’ll know the flow is working when you get green arrows at each step. You can also head over to your SharePoint list, and you should see your message added to the list. The email address of the sender will be in the first column, the message body in the second, and then when you click the individual item, you’ll see the attachments listed there — just click on them to open them up.

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Voila! You’ve just made your first flow and organized a bunch of stuff out of your inbox into a single place where you can share the load with co-workers.

Now let’s make things really interesting by adding artificial intelligence to your flows. This is where automation becomes truly powerful, handling tasks that traditionally required human review.

In this example, let’s ask Copilot to create a flow that automatically processes invoices using AI Builder, a Power Platform feature that creates AI models that automate your business processes. What’s cool about this example is that you’re going to build it simply by describing what you want in natural language, and as part of the resulting flow, Power Automate will integrate AI Builder actions, which use generative AI to review and extract information from existing data and then do something with it.

Note: You’ll need an AI Builder credit allocation or a premium Power Automate license to work with this section.

Create a new flow in Power Automate, and then click Describe it to design it. You’ll get the following screen as a result:

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

Now, in the large box in the center of the screen, just describe the flow you want to create. I’ll give you some language here, which you can either cut and paste yourself into the wizard, or you can change any part of it you like simply by customizing the prompt.

Example: When a new invoice file is created in SharePoint, I want to use AI Builder to extract information from the invoices. Specifically, I want to extract the invoice number (highly recommended), date, total amount, vendor information, and line items (if needed). Once that information has been extracted, I want the information to be added to a list in SharePoint, with the AI-extracted fields mapped to list columns, and also including the processing date and status. I also want to send an email to accounting to notify them of the presence of the invoice, and that email should include extracted data in the email body, have the original invoice file attached, and should also have links to the SharePoint entry. I also want some error handling to check if AI extraction succeeded, and if it didn’t, I want an email to notify me of the failure and also to create a task for manual review.

Once you’ve got the prompt set, click the arrow at the bottom right of the prompt window to enter it. Depending on how you customized your prompt, you’ll get something like the following flowchart, reflecting Power Automate’s interpretation of your prompt:

Jonathan Hassell / Foundry

That’s it! You can click Next below the suggested flow and then click each action as we did before to configure the specific SharePoint libraries, lists, and files involved as well as the email contents and bodies.

Reliability is the cornerstone of successful automation. While creating flows is exciting, ensuring that they continue to work flawlessly is what separates effective automation from frustrating setbacks. Let me walk you through how to build robust, dependable flows that you can trust.

First, think about error handling as you build your flow. After each major action, take a moment to consider what might go wrong. Maybe an email won’t send, a file won’t upload, or data won’t process correctly. These potential failure points need safeguards.

This is where Run after settings become your best friend. You can create an action that responds to what happens during a previous step in the sequence: when the step is successful, when it fails, when it’s skipped, when it times out, or some combination of the above. Think of this as your flow’s safety net.

For example, you could set up an action that sends you an email notification if a previous action fails, is skipped, or times out. Click the + sign after an action to add a new step. Search for and select Send me an email notification. Type in a subject line for the notification (which could include the Subject line from the original email, via the / key, dynamic content pane) and some body text indicating that the flow did not complete successfully.

Next, right-click the new action in the flow and select Run after from the pop-up menu. The action’s pane opens to the Settings tab. Scroll down to the “Run after” section. You’ll see the name of the action immediately above it in the flow. Click that action to expand it, then check Has timed out, Is skipped, and Has failed. Uncheck Is successful.

If you like, you can add other previous actions to this list by clicking Select actions and selecting the actions you want, then expanding and checking/unchecking the status options under each action. In this way, you can set up a single “Run after” step for all the previous actions in a flow, or you can create different “Run after” steps for different actions in the flow.

By setting up “Run after” responses, you’ll be prepared when something does go wrong. Set up notification actions to alert you immediately if a step fails. Create incident tickets so your team can track issues. Keep a log of errors in a spreadsheet for pattern analysis. And don’t forget about retry logic — sometimes a second attempt is all that’s needed to succeed.

Parallel branches are another powerful tool for reliability. By clicking the + symbol between steps and choosing Add parallel branch, you can create simultaneous operations. This is perfect for running independent processes, maintaining backup procedures, or sending out secondary notifications. Think of it as having multiple backup plans running simultaneously.

Finally, let’s talk about monitoring — your early warning system for potential issues. Create a daily monitoring flow that runs automatically. Have it check your flow history and look for any failures. Set it up to send you a daily digest summarizing what’s working and what needs attention. Include success rates so you can spot trends before they become problems.

Your monitoring system should also include smart alerts. Set up notifications for critical failures that need immediate attention. Configure warnings when performance starts to slip. Track usage statistics to ensure you’re making the most of your automation resources.

Remember, reliability isn’t about preventing every possible problem — it’s about having systems in place to catch issues early and resolve them quickly. With these practices in place, you can build flows that don’t just work today but continue working reliably long into the future.

Microsoft Power Automate provides a service like Zapier and IFTTT that is well integrated with both Microsoft 365 and many other popular cloud services used by individuals and businesses alike. While I’m not exhaustively comparing Power Automate to IFTTT and Zapier, Microsoft shops and especially organizations already in bed with Microsoft 365 may find integrating flows into their daily work easier and more user-friendly.

Whatever the situation, using flows can mean the difference between forgetting subtle but critical details in business workflows and having all of your bases covered.

This article was originally published in October 2019 and updated in March 2025.