In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to set up an account and explore the features that the Power Automate environment provides. The environment is where you can create and securely isolate your flows, gateways, connections, and other resources. When starting with Power Automate, we need to make sure that we have the right environment.
Creating A Power Automate Account
First, go to the Power Automate website. You can also alternatively search Microsoft Power Automate in Google, and it’ll take you to the same page. The photo might be different but the most important thing is that it has the Power Automate link on the top left.
In this website, we need to create a business account, not a personal account. This is because business accounts allow us to access more advanced features and tools that personal accounts don’t.
Additionally, we don’t want to pay for this yet, because we’re still learning it. So, before we entirely commit to the software, we can just create a free account and sign up for a trial version. Let’s now click the Try free button.
This will open a little text box where we can type our email. For this example, I’m going to enter my personal email and click the arrow button.
By clicking the arrow button, it will give us a warning that indicates I entered a personal email ID, and that I’ll only be able to use premium connectors and organization features if I use a work or school email instead. We definitely would like to use those features. That’s the reason why we need to create a business account, and not a personal account.
So when you’re typing your email, type your workplace email, or an email that doesn’t end with gmail.com, yahoo.com, or outlook.com. If you want to create a business account and you don’t have one, you can simply create a temporary email for now.
Creating A Temporary Email
Go to tempail.com. There are several different versions that exist, but all you need to do is to copy the email that it generated for you.
Then paste it in the input box for email. It will then trick Microsoft into thinking that you’re creating a business account.
A dialog box will then appear and ask if you got your email address from your company. Just click Yes.
Setting Up A Business Account
You can now create a business account. Just type in your credentials and the site will send you a verification code.
After that, just go back to the temporary email and you’ll see that you received a verification code from Microsoft.
Put the verification code in, choose the United States as our country, then click Start.
We have now created a business Microsoft Power Automate account without a business or workplace email. This is applicable if you just want to try out the software. We don’t need to buy the software because right now, we’re just learning and exploring it.
If you see this page, then you’re in the right spot. This is basically our Microsoft Power Automate environment.
Power Automate Environment Walkthrough
Now, let’s take a quick tour of our development environment. On the left side, we can click the 3 bars to see the different pages that we can look at.
Basic Sections In The Power Automate Environment
For the basic sections, we have the Home page which gives us basic information.
We also have My flows. Once we start creating flows, we’ll be able to see all of them here. We’ll also be able to import flows.
The Create page is where we can create the different flows. We can either start from a blank flow, create from a template, or create from the connector.
The Templates page is where the templates are located. Again, templates are flows that have already been created by other people. These are very easy to set up.
If we want to create a flow where we save an Office 365 email attachment to our One Drive for business, or create another flow where we click a button to email a note to ourselves, they are already available in this section.
We also have the Connectors page. Connectors are basically different applications that can serve as triggers, conditions, or actions to our flow. So, we can have something in Planner to trigger a certain action in 365 Outlook. We can also have something in YouTube to trigger an action in GitHub.
There are different combinations that we can put together since there are a lot of connectors that Power Automate offers.
Advanced Sections In The Power Automate Environment
In the advanced section, we’ll talk about how you can actually integrate your own connectors. Data and AI Builder are more advanced features that I will skip for now.
If you think about the Power Platform, there is Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power Portals. All of these are built together on what’s called Solutions. That’s outside the scope of this tutorial, but in brief, Solutions are ways to integrate flow with other variables.
Then there’s also the Learn page. This basically takes us to the Power Automate documentation.
All in all, these are the different pages that are available in the Power Automate environment. Let’s now go back to the Home page.
Settings And Profile Section
The last thing that I want to show you is this upper right part of the environment.
In this section, we have the Help button.
It also indicates the environment that we are in. In this example, it shows that we’re in the default environment.
By clicking the gear icon, we can also customize a few settings such as the theme we’re using.
This part shows us our profile as well.
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Conclusion
That’s all for our environment walkthrough. To summarize, an environment is a space to store and manage your organization’s flows, PowerApps, and business data. As you can see, the environment is user-friendly. It’s simple to navigate and very intuitive as well. Hopefully, this will put you at ease when making automation processes.
All the best,
Henry
