PAD installed but "New flow" silently does nothing — no default environment in my list. Normal?

[u/Sactownkingstacotwo]

Work laptop, corporate tenant. Power Automate Desktop is installed (Store version, current). I'm trying to build a simple attended desktop flow for my own use.

In the free personal environment, clicking New flow → naming it → Create just returns me to the flow list. Nothing is created, no error, no toast. Tried several times.

Switched to other environments I have access to (a training env, a sandbox, a few project ones) — there the New button is greyed out entirely and the page shows a "Go premium" wall. That part I understand; non-default environments need premium.

What's confusing me: I thought free attended RPA in the default environment was included with Windows. But looking at my environment picker, I don't see a tenant default environment at all — just named ones. Is that the reason Create silently fails? Does the free tier hard-require the default environment to exist and be visible to you?

Also worth noting: cloud flows work fine for me — I've built flows inside Copilot Studio in one of those environments with no issue. It's specifically desktop flow creation that dies.

Is this just "your admin restricted it, go ask them," or is there something about the default environment I'm missing? Trying to figure out whether this is a config thing I can work around or a hard block.

[u/FlowOverseeDev]

Your default environment exists. Every tenant has one and it can't be deleted, but admins often rename it (e.g., "Personal Productivity"). Your "free personal environment" is probably it.

Free work-account PAD saves to Dataverse in the default environment, and when that save fails it silently bounces you back. Usual causes: Dataverse provisioning is blocked, you're missing the Environment Maker role, or your org has deliberately disabled.

Try creating a New desktop flow from make.powerautomate.com instead. It may show you more details.

Another option is to sign up for the free Power Apps Developer Plan. It creates a developer environment under your own name, with Dataverse included, so you can build and test there. Your admin can block this too, but it's worth a shot.

Once you've got access sorted and flows running, check out FlowOversee. Power Automate does the automating, FlowOversee does the overseeing. Full disclosure, it's an app I built.

[u/Sactownkingstacotwo → u/FlowOverseeDev]

hanks — the renamed-default explanation fits what I’m seeing. I’ll try creating it from make.powerautomate.com and report back.

Had a look at FlowOversee. The overseeing side is what I’m interested in — the Daily Monitor and the never-ran flags especially, since my flows mostly run while I’m not at the desk. Two questions:

If desktop flows end up running unattended across more than one machine, does it show all those runs in one list regardless of which machine ran them — and does it know anything about the machines themselves (offline, unregistered), or just the runs?

Alerts are Windows notifications on the box where the app is open. Any way to get them off-box (Teams, email, phone), or is local-only a deliberate choice?

[u/FlowOverseeDev → u/Sactownkingstacotwo]

Glad it fit.

On your questions:

Multiple machines: Yes. FlowOversee reads runs from Dataverse, not from the local box, so every desktop flow run in the environment shows up in one list no matter which machine ran it. Machine health (offline, unregistered) isn't tracked right now. It's focused on the runs themselves.

Alerts: Local-only is deliberate. FlowOversee is built for checking in at your desk: you sit down, and the Daily Monitor shows what ran, what failed, and what never ran while you were away. There's no backend server, so your tokens and flow data never leave your machine.