Power Automate Tutorials

If you’ve ever found yourself doing the same thing in Microsoft 365 over and over again — copying data between lists, sending the same email every Monday, chasing approvals manually — Power Automate was built for exactly that.

I’ve been working with Power Automate since it was called Microsoft Flow, and over the years, I’ve built hundreds of flows for real organizations across industries. The tutorials on this page are everything I wish I’d had when I was learning — practical, step-by-step, and written in plain language without unnecessary jargon.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or you’ve been building flows for a while and want to level up, you’re in the right place.

What Is Microsoft Power Automate?

Power Automate is Microsoft’s workflow automation tool, part of the Microsoft Power Platform. It lets you connect apps and services — like SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, Excel, Dataverse, and hundreds of third-party tools — and automate the repetitive work that happens between them.

Think of it this way: instead of manually moving a file, sending a notification, updating a record, and kicking off an approval every time something happens, you build that process once as a “flow” and Power Automate runs it automatically every single time.

It works across three main areas:

Cloud flows — automated, scheduled, or instant workflows that run in the cloud, connecting Microsoft 365 apps and external services
Desktop flows — robotic process automation (RPA) that automates legacy desktop applications and repetitive UI tasks on your computer
Business process flows — guided step-by-step processes that walk users through a defined workflow inside a model-driven app

Most of the tutorials on this page focus on cloud flows, since that’s where the majority of real-world automation happens for Microsoft 365 users.

Who Are These Tutorials For?

Honestly, everyone — but let me be more specific:

Complete beginners who have never built a flow and want to understand the basics before touching anything
SharePoint and Power Apps developers who want to add automation to the apps and sites they’re already building
Business analysts and IT admins who want to automate approval processes, notifications, and data operations without writing code
Intermediate developers who know the basics but want to go deeper into expressions, error handling, HTTP requests, and custom connectors

I write every tutorial here assuming you’re intelligent but not necessarily familiar with the tool. I won’t talk down to you, and I won’t skip steps.

How Power Automate Works — The Basics

Before you dive into the tutorials, let me give you a quick mental model that makes everything click faster.

Every flow in Power Automate is made up of two things:

1. A Trigger — the event that starts the flow. Something has to happen first. Examples:

A new item is added to a SharePoint list
An email arrives in your inbox with a specific subject
Someone submits a Microsoft Form
A button is tapped in a Power Apps canvas app
A scheduled time is reached (every day at 8am, every Monday, etc.)

2. Actions — the steps that run after the trigger fires. Examples:

Send an email or Teams message
Create, update, or delete a SharePoint item
Start an approval process
Copy a file to a different folder
Update a row in an Excel table or Dataverse record
Call an external API

That’s really it at its core. A trigger starts the flow, and actions define what the flow does. Everything else — conditions, loops, variables, expressions, error handling — is built on top of that foundation.

The Three Types of Cloud Flows

When you create a new cloud flow, Power Automate asks you what type you want. Here’s what each one means:

Automated cloud flow
Runs automatically when a specific event occurs — like a new SharePoint item, an incoming email, or a Teams message. You don’t have to do anything manually once it’s set up.

Instant cloud flow (also called Manual flow)
Runs when you manually trigger it — by pressing a button in Power Apps, tapping a button in the Power Automate mobile app, or running it from a SharePoint list item. Good for on-demand processes where a human decides when to kick it off.

Scheduled cloud flow
Runs on a schedule you define — every hour, every day at a specific time, every first Monday of the month. Perfect for automated reports, data cleanups, and recurring notifications.

What You’ll Learn in These Tutorials

I’m adding new tutorials to this page regularly. Here’s the kind of content you can expect:

Getting Started

What is Power Automate and how does it fit into Microsoft 365
Understanding triggers, actions, and connectors
Creating your first automated flow from scratch
Using templates vs building from blank
How to test and debug a flow

Working With SharePoint

Automatically send an email when a new SharePoint list item is created
Send approval emails and update list items based on the response
Move files between SharePoint libraries using flows
Use Power Automate to set SharePoint column values conditionally
Get items from a SharePoint list and loop through them

Approvals

Build a single-level approval flow
Build a multi-level sequential approval workflow
Handle approval timeouts and reminders
Send adaptive card approvals in Microsoft Teams

Expressions and Variables

Initialize and set variables in a flow
Use expressions to manipulate text, dates, and numbers
Work with formatDateTime, concat, split, and other common expressions
Use conditions and switch actions for branching logic

Loops and Arrays

Apply to each — how to loop through a list of items
Filter arrays to find specific records
Use Select to reshape data from one format to another
How to avoid the “Apply to each” performance trap

Advanced Topics

Error handling with Configure run after settings
Using the HTTP action to call external REST APIs
Child flows — how to break large flows into reusable pieces
Custom connectors — connecting Power Automate to any API
Working with JSON and parsing responses
Power Automate Desktop (RPA) basics

Power Apps + Power Automate Together

Trigger a flow from a Power Apps button
Return data from a flow back to Power Apps
Use flows to handle operations that Power Apps can’t do on its own

A Few Things I Always Tell Beginners

Before you start, here are three things that will save you a lot of frustration early on:

1. Test in small steps
Don’t build a 20-step flow and test it all at once. Add two or three actions, test, see the output, then keep going. Power Automate shows you exactly what data flowed through each step after a run — use that to your advantage.

2. Understand dynamic content vs expressions
Dynamic content is the click-to-insert approach — Power Automate shows you available outputs from previous steps and you pick them. Expressions are more powerful formulas you type manually (like formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'dd/MM/yyyy')). You’ll need both, and knowing when to use each one is a key skill.

3. Name your flows and actions properly
A flow called “Flow 1” and actions called “Get items” and “Get items 2” will confuse you in two weeks. Rename every action to describe what it actually does. “Get pending leave requests from SharePoint” is infinitely better than “Get items 3.”

Here are the list of Power Automate tutorials.