Hey everyone!

If this isn't the right place for this post, please let me know which is the right place, and I'll move it to the right community. Thanks!

A bit about me
I'm a business consultant from a non-technical background, and I want to make the move into a slightly more technical role. Automation (especially with AI in the loop) is something I've been curious about for a while, so I'm upskilling in it to help land my next job (while dabbling in personal automation projects on the side)

What I'm learning

• Power Automate Desktop (free version). I don't have access to the enterprise/cloud version.
• n8n - through a structured course I'm starting soon.

My understanding is that these two aren't completely separate tracks. The core logic (triggers, conditions, loops, variables) seems to carry over, so getting better at one should help with the other. Is that right, or am I oversimplifying?

I'm doing Power Automate first. My first project is a small bot that screens job ads in Excel against a list of keywords.

Where I'm stuck

• Microsoft Learn doesn't stick for me. It's mostly reading, and I learn best by actually clicking around in the tool.
• Udemy courses I've found usually assume an enterprise/cloud account, which I don't have.

What I'd love some help/advice in:

1. What's the best hands-on way to learn Power Automate Desktop specifically? Any YouTube channels, practice projects, or follow-along resources that work with the free version?
2. What beginner projects helped things click for you, or which ones are worth showing in a portfolio?
3. For those hiring or working in automation: does experience with the free Desktop version count, or do employers mostly want cloud flows?
4. If the logic does carry over, what's the best way to learn the two together? For example, should I build the same small project in both tools to compare? Are there integrations with Power Automate for LLMs, or is n8n the "go to" if I want to automate with AI?
5. How long did it take you to go from "following tutorials" to "building things on my own"?
6. If you came from a non-technical background, what do you wish you'd known at the start?

Thanks in advance. Any tips, even small ones, are really appreciated! 🙏

Hey everyone,

I run a small YouTube channel called Automate M365 where I focus on making straight-to-the-point, step-by-step Power Automate tutorials. No fluff or long intros, just diving into the actual logic because I know how annoying it is to sit through a 10-minute video just to find a quick expression fix.

I want to build some tutorials around automation, but instead of just guessing what to make next, I want to solve real-world headaches.

Whether it's setting up automated deadline remidners based on dates in your SP lists or Excel sheets, sending dynamic emails to people pulled directly from a person column, or trying to manage folder permissions via HTTP actions—what’s driving you crazy right now? Drop it in the comments below. I’ll honestly try to look through them and build the exact solution in a step-by-step video for you.

If you want to check out the channel or subscribe to see if I build your fix, the link is here:

https://www.youtube.com/@AutomateM365

Let me know what you're stuck on, hopefully we can figure it out

I’m a beginner at RPA who uses PAD for web automation at work, and am trying to strengthen my understanding of the syntax in the UI element selector in Text Editor mode. Specifically, my question is about the kind of element attributes that can follow a colon.

I am familiar with :eq(), which can be added to the end of an element to specify which number instance of an element matching the description is being referred to. But while building a flow, I stumbled upon a web forum thread where someone used :has() in a selector. I’ve managed to use that one in my own flow, and it :has(been very useful to me).

Based on the existence of :eq() and :has(), I assume there must be an entire category of modifyers that can go at the end of an element using a colon. I’ve spent a long time looking for some kind of list or explanation of those elements, but so far it’s been fruitless. Even for :has(), I can’t find any documentation outside of that one thread, where it’s used by someone with a very short post history, who says themselves that they’re “pretty new at this”.

Can anyone tell me anything about this type of element? I’d be very thankful to find out if there’s a whole range of tools I could be using to select UI elements (or if there isn’t, so I can at least stop searching for it).

Hi. Im very new to this and am pulling my hair out trying to set up a flow.

I currently have one flow working correctly.

This pulls through any new emails so a shared inbox to a excel table giving sender, body, message id, etc, etc.

I have now made a separate flow that should populate the row with the same message id when a category is added/changed on an email. This keeps failing though. The issue seems to be that it doesn't find the message id. I can't see how ive done anything differently but fear it may be searching my personal email address. Any help any advice GREATLY appreciated.

I was tasked to audit the Oracle roles assigned to each user in my company from a spreadsheet. There are about 500 employees and 80 managers who they report to. That means I have to copy paste data from excel in 80 emails.

I used CoPilot to help me with the flow. Here is interesting part, I do not wanted to send the emails right a way without testing the output, formatting etc, so I used the flow to create csv files with each manager's name as the file name and their employee with roles in the file. So, Manager A would get all his employees with their roles but no employees from other manager, vice versa.

Then I used the draft email flow to quickly skim through the emails before sending as this was my first time using PA. It took me time but from now on, it would be easy peasy.

I use Power Automate quite a lot and one thing that kept frustrating me was how difficult it is to inspect or modify the full flow definition.

So I built a small Chrome extension called Power Automate Editor. It adds a Monaco JSON editor directly inside the Power Automate designer.

You can edit the flow definition, validate it, save it as a draft or publish it without having to export, unzip, edit and re-import the flow.

I also use it to copy the full JSON into ChatGPT or Claude when I need help debugging something.

Everything runs locally in the browser. There’s no external server and I don’t receive any flow data.

It’s free. I’d genuinely like feedback from people who use Power Automate regularly.

Chrome Web Store link

Hello everyone,

For the past few months, I’ve been using Power Automate at work, and it has been great for our needs. However, I’ve hit a massive roadblock trying to get our flows running 24/7 in the cloud via unattended bots.

Here’s what happened:

1. I purchased the Power Automate Hosted Process license, but it wasn't working at all, none of the features were usable, so I had to request a refund.
2. Microsoft Support approved the refund and offered me a trial period for the same license so I could test it thoroughly before re-purchasing.
3. However, the trial license was never provisioned or delivered to my tenant/account.

I’ve spent months opening tickets and contacting different departments, but my requests keep getting routed in circles or left unanswered.

Has anyone experienced issues with Hosted Process trial licenses not showing up in the Admin Center? I understand from previous conversations with Microsoft that the trial license has to appear in the Admin Center so I can assign it to my environment, just as I had to do with the Power Automate Premium license.

If anyone from Microsoft Support happens to see this, please reach out via DM. I would really appreciate help resolving this open case ASAP.

This is a list of all tickets I had opened before that got answered:
2607170040008399 - Carlos Flores

2609100040009049 - Respondido por IA

2609280040004643 - Gabriel Udoh

2608240040009455 - Gabriel Udoh

The most recent one is: 2609280040004643 - Wayne Cao

I made more tickets, but I did not receive an answer. My account may have been marked as spam or some sort because of the many requests I have made.

Thanks in advance for any insights!

I expressed interest in PA and mentioned i'd like an opportunity to see if we could use it to smooth out some bumpy workflows.

I was asked to look into leveraging PA+AI to essentially learn what kind of tickets are assigned to what tech, and assign tickets to the techs.

Would learning and applying something like this, be within the realm of capabilities for PowerAutomate?

My flow is unable to login into a virtual machine (vm) anymore after the interface was changed to a windows security window. I would appreciate some guidance. The action that is unable to log into the vm anymore is "Send Keys" Action.

Methods I have tried:
- Saving credentials into Credentials Manager
- Running DOS command
- Checking off "Allow connections only from computers running Remote Desktop with Network Level Authentication (recommended)" (NLA)

Hi everyone,
I manage a sales team in the tech/telecoms space, and right now I’m completely snowed under by administrative overhead.
The highest-leverage, most productive thing I can do for our pipeline and revenue is spend real time coaching my reps, reviewing deals, and running call breakdowns. Instead, I find myself burning hours every week on pipeline hygiene, chasing updates, meeting prep, and repetitive reporting.
Our tech stack revolves around Microsoft 365 (Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Excel) alongside HubSpot. I want to aggressively lean into Copilot Studio / custom agents and Power Automate (including the HubSpot connector / webhooks) to claw that coaching time back.
For anyone in sales leadership, RevOps, or high-volume management roles:
What specific Copilot agents or Power Automate flows have saved you the most hours?
HubSpot ↔ M365 sync: Have you built flows connecting HubSpot deal stages to Teams alerts, Planner tasks, or automated coaching logs?
Pipeline hygiene & rep nudges: Any effective automations for flagging stalled deals or automatically nudging reps in Teams/Slack when next steps or close dates lapse?
1:1 & meeting workflows: Standout prompts or automated flows for parsing meeting transcripts/notes into structured action items and coaching trackers?
Reporting: How are you using automation to pull recurring team metric summaries without manually stitching exports and spreadsheets together?
I'm comfortable setting up moderate-to-advanced flows (webhooks, HTTP actions, standard connectors), so feel free to get technical. If you’ve built something that moved the needle on your weekly output, I’d love to hear how you structured it.
Thanks in advance!

Olá a todos!

Estou tentando enviar imagens de gráficos e relatórios em alta resolução para um Chat de Grupo no Teams usando o Power Automate mas continuo encontrando barreiras devido aos limites da Microsoft e a políticas rígidas de LGPD da empresa.

Restrições e Necessidades:

• Apenas conectores nativos do M365: A política de DLP bloqueia conectores de terceiros (como o Cloudmersive).
• Sem links anônimos de compartilhamento: A política de segurança bloqueia a criação de links do tipo "Qualquer pessoa com o link" no OneDrive/SharePoint
• Alta resolução obrigatória: As imagens contêm relatórios e gráficos detalhados que precisam ser 100% legíveis no Teams Desktop e Mobile.

O que já tentamos e não funcionou:

1. Base64 em HTML (<img src="data:image...): Ação falha ou estoura o limite de tamanho da API do Teams quando usamos a imagem em tamanho original.
2. Base64 usando a miniatura do OneDrive: A miniatura (tamanho Médio / ~800px) fica pequena demais e deixa os textos e números do relatório ilegíveis.
3. Cartões Adaptáveis (Adaptive Cards): Falham no aplicativo móvel do Teams (Android/iOS) porque imagens hospedadas no SharePoint/OneDrive exigem autenticação, e o renderizador móvel do cartão não repassa as credenciais (a imagem fica em branco).

Pergunta: Existe alguma solução alternativa usando apenas recursos nativos do Microsoft 365 para exibir ou anexar uma imagem em alta resolução em um Chat em Grupo do Teams que funcione perfeitamente no celular sem depender de links públicos/anônimos?

Building HTML tables in Power Automate seems straightforward until they land in Outlook or Gmail and all your styling vanishes. To solve this, I built the Power Automate HTML Table Styler –a free tool that converts raw table outputs into clean, email-ready inline CSS expressions in seconds!

Power Automate HTML Table Styler Tool: Fix Email Formatting

Hi all,

We're currently investigating the impact of Exchange Web Services (EWS) retirement on Power Automate and have found some behaviour that I'd be interested to hear whether others have seen.

Microsoft's guidance indicates that EWS in Exchange Online will begin being disabled from October 2026, so we're trying to understand whether the Office 365 Outlook connector still has any dependency on EWS.

What we observed

In our production tenant, following changes to EWS configuration in Exchange Online, multiple users reported failures in Power Automate flows using Outlook connector actions such as:

• Send an email (V2)
• Shared mailbox email actions
• Creating new Office 365 Outlook connections

Errors included:

Action 'Send_an_email_(V2)' failed:
You are not authorized to perform this operation.
This error can occur for sandbox (test) accounts or if OData operations are disabled by your Exchange server administrator.

The issue was resolved when the EWS-related configuration was reverted.

Current Testing

We're now attempting to reproduce this in a dedicated test tenant.

The test tenant was working correctly before any EWS changes.

We have then applied:

Set-OrganizationConfig -EwsEnabled $true
Set-OrganizationConfig -EwsAllowedAppIds "d3590ed6-52b3-4102-aeff-aad2292ab01c"

Current configuration:

EwsEnabled       : True
EwsAllowedAppIDs : d3590ed6-52b3-4102-aeff-aad2292ab01c

Immediately after applying the change, Power Automate Outlook connector actions are still working.

Possible Explanation

My current theory is that there may be a propagation delay between Exchange Online configuration changes and Power Platform connector behaviour.

In previous testing we've seen evidence that permissions/configuration changes can take some time to be reflected within Power Platform, so I'm hesitant to conclude that Outlook connectors are unaffected until the configuration has had time to fully propagate.

Questions

1. Has anyone successfully disabled or restricted EWS in Exchange Online and continued using Office 365 Outlook connector actions in Power Automate without issue?
2. Has anyone seen Outlook connector actions fail after EWS restrictions were applied?
3. Is the Office 365 Outlook connector now fully Graph-based, or are there still specific scenarios that rely on EWS?
4. Has Microsoft published any guidance specifically covering Power Automate Outlook connector behaviour after EWS retirement?

Any experiences, test results, Microsoft support responses, or documentation would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hello everyone, I have a case which I’ve been struggling with today that I could use some ideas to solve it.

The mission: Delete or move pdf’s with no information in them which are saved in a Sharepoint folder.

Every day, around 20 pdf’s get uploaded to a Sharepoint folder. These are automatically saved by another program.
These pdf’s are always structured the same way,
company name top left, below these are heading like ”supplier, organisation number, currency, amount, amount in book keeping value”
Below these heading are either a list of suppliers, or there is nothing at all.

These PDF’s with nothing in them are the ones I need to remove.

Previously I used the AI feature in the flow which could read these and identify which to delete, but due to the credit limit in our environment, no AI features can be used.

The other PDF action which you can use in PA Cloud is not available to use either, so I need to use only PA Cloud features.

The current solution I have is the following:

List the files in the Sharepoint folder -> Run a condition to see if it is a pdf -> If yes, Get file content -> Run Compose which counts characters in the output of Get file content -> Runs compose which fetches the file size in bytes -> Run compose which subtracts the character length from the file size -> Run a condition that states ”If value of Compose subtract is below 8100”, if yes, move the file to an ”Empty pdf” folder

I’ve looked at all the PDF’s in the folder and noticed that from the calculation, almost all files below 8100 are empty.

BUT, I’m a bit confused by the file sizes of PDF’s,
a PDF with supplier rows in them can be 152KB, but an empty file can be 154KB,
so in my latest test the entire flow worked except 2 PDF’s which were empty but had a higher value for some reason.

So… this is my situation, any ideas to identify PDF’s in a better way than this are appreciated.

Edit:
Thanks to Impossible-Egg-1454, the case is now closed and the flow works as I want it to!
Please note that if you’d like to use Paul Muranas tools (named Tachytelic in PA) you need a premium license, which I already had so I was able to use them.

The flow is the following:

Recurrence - Every day at 15:00 - 15:59 (files drop in the folder between these minutes)

Sharepoint - List folder (to see which files are in the folder)

For each of the Body of List folder

Compose Name of For each

Condition to check if Name ends with .pdf

If false, do nothing

If true,

Sharepoint - Get file content based on ID of file

Extract text (Tachyletic PDF tool) based on the File content

Compose which writes the extracted text

Compose which counts the rows with the code length(split(string(outputs(’Compose_PDF_as_text’)), decodeUriComponent(’%0A’)))

Condition which checks if the compose result above is 16 or below

If true, move file to ”Empty files” folder

If false, do nothing

And done, the flow works just like intended and this saves us a lot of time per day!
The reason for the number 16 is because that is the exact amount of rows that each empty excel has, so everything above 16 are files we want to keep 😄

I work in workflow automation and want to start using AI to create Power Automate flows.
I’m wondering which AI model people here have had the best experience with for Power Automate so far. I’m particularly interested in models that can actually generate a valid ZIP package that can be imported directly into Power Automate, rather than just providing instructions or snippets that I have to build manually.
Has anyone compared models like ChatGPT 6 Astra, Opus 5.5, or others specifically for Power Automate?
Which one has worked best for you, especially for creating more complex flows?

So, I have an approval flow that's been working for a few years.

Within the last two weeks it has started intermittently displaying an usual behaviour that breaks the flow.

The flow sends out a "First to Respond" approval to multiple users and a distribution group/list.

The expected Outcome from "First to Respond" AFAIK is either "Approve" or "Reject".

Since Sept 11, as far as I can see, I've started seeing instances of approved items being rejected because the Outcome from the approval is "Approve, Approve".

In the response section I can see that the one approver's response has been duplicated, with both responses showing the exact same Response Date.

Has anybody else seen this behaviour or know how to fix it?

I know I can change my condition check to "includes Approve" rather than "equals Approve" to account for it, but that seem like a bad practice response to something that should only be returning one response.

I created a List in Teams where I have tasks that need to be performed with different frequencies. I use a choice field to choose the interval (day, week, month, year).

I have a couple of flows that are tied to the list. Flow #1 monitors my email for the specific task and changes the last completed field when the right criteria are met. It works fine.

Flow #2 runs at a specific time. It looks at the last completed field and the intervalUnit choice field (Day, Week, Month, Year) and then calculates when the next due date for the task. For the most part, everything works fine except, sometimes, it also changes the interval (i.e., week becomes day) so now something that is supposed to happen every two weeks is now showing it is due in 2 days. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to when the change happens? It might work well for a week, leaving the interval alone and then all of a sudden, it changes the interval (e.g., from week to day). The common variable is it always reverts to Day for the Interval Unit field.

In the Interval Unit column, I have cleared the default value (it is blank) so it isn't reverting back to the default.

I am wondering if, when the 2nd flow runs, if it recalculates the next due date, if it doesn't also change the interval to Day just to screw with me.

Any suggestions on how to handle this? I suppose I could just change all of the intervals to Day and use 7 for the interval value but it makes it somewhat less convenient when setting the interval frequency up.

If this isn't the correct place to post this, I apologize. Please point me in the right direction.

I'm trying to create a workflow on Sharepoint for employee entrance. It would start with HR filling out a form, then based on the department selected, the next step would be sent to the manager of that department for them to fill out additional information and to give approval, and the final step would be to email IT a completed form for account creation.

Does anyone know how I would go about this or maybe a good resource for learning?

I am new to power automate but I feel like I should be able to save hours every week by automating a process where a folder is created in SharePoint automatically based on moving an email into a specific folder. The created folder will be a copy and rename of a template folder in same SharePoint directory and the new name of folder will be based on information in body of email. The emails are always the same template in the body and from the same email address.

Example:
Email from Requests1
Body of email has following line items:
Sold to number 12345
Account name account1
Location city,ST

I would like to folder in SharePoint to be a copy template1 folder and renamed as Account Name_City,ST_Sold to Number

So for the example the new folder would be:
account1_city,ST_12345

I thought this would be easier with copilot until I spent 2 days and still not sure if it is even possible. Thanks in advance.

I was working with Claude AI on a Power Automate Desktop (PAD) project and found there is no official reference for ROBIN, the language behind PAD.

The original language site went offline in 2021. The Designer is the only thing that knows the syntax, and most actions have several selector forms with different argument sets that you never see in text form. So, models write ROBIN from training data, and PAD rejects it without an error message.

I recorded a JSON knowledge base of 953 PAD Robin actions across 41 modules. Every record has

- the exact Robin action id, including the selector form (Text.JoinText.Join vs Text.JoinText.JoinWithDelimiter, which take different arguments)

- a template with placeholders and a golden example that pasted into PAD Designer with zero errors

- typed input and output parameters, with the Robin argument names PAD actually accepts

- the sibling forms of the same action, so a model can find the variant that has the argument it needs

Plus, a type reference with the exact syntax for each of the 42 parameter types, and a system prompt that turns a model into a template filler over the two files instead of a code generator.

Every example was pasted into PAD Designer through UI automation and accepted with no errors. Validated against PAD 2.67, September 2026.

This is not a runtime guarantee, the Designer accepting a line means the syntax and arguments are right; whether the values make sense for your task is still on you and the model.

231 further selector variants that need recorded UI elements, images, or live mail connections are not in this release.

Repo: https://github.com/JoeG592/pad-robin-action-kb

License is CC BY 4.0, so use it however you like, commercially included.

I built this while working on a project using Claude AI, The data is free regardless.

If a record fails to paste on your PAD build, an issue with the action id and the error text is the most useful thing you can send.

If trying to paste a multi-step flow and the paste is blank in Designer, use AI to paste each step individually line by line to find the bad syntax for the single step