Lesson 1.1 · M1 Get Started with Power Automate

Power Automate Essentials

The vocabulary and building blocks behind every flow you'll build in this course — triggers, actions, connectors, and the environments they run in.

10 min read

What a flow actually is

A Power Automate flow is a sequence of steps that runs automatically when something happens. Every flow has exactly one trigger — the event that starts it — followed by any number of actions, the individual operations the flow performs in order, one after another (or in parallel branches, if you design it that way).

The four flow types you'll meet in this course

Automated cloud flow — starts on an event from a connector: a new email, a modified row, a new SharePoint item. No human clicks anything to start it.
Instant cloud flow — starts when someone manually runs it, often from a button, with optional input fields. This is what Lab 5 builds.
Scheduled cloud flow — starts on a recurrence (every day, every hour). Lab 6 uses this to email a daily summary.
Business process flow — guides users step-by-step through a process on top of Dataverse tables. Not built in this course, but good to recognize.

Key terms

  • Connector — the bridge between Power Automate and an app or service (SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, Dataverse). Each connector exposes its own set of triggers and actions.
  • Connection — your authenticated link to a specific connector, tied to your sign-in. A flow can't run an action until its connection is authorized.
  • Dynamic content — output from an earlier step (like a SharePoint item's Title) inserted into a later step's field, instead of typing a fixed value.
  • Expression — a small formula (like utcNow()) you insert into a field when dynamic content alone isn't enough.
  • Environment — the container your flows, connections, and Dataverse data live in. Every lab in this course happens in the Dev One environment.
  • Flow checker — Power Automate's built-in linter; it flags missing connections, empty required fields, and unreachable steps before you run.

Three ways to start building

Lab 1 walks through all three: starting from a template (a pre-built flow you customize), describing what you want to Microsoft's Copilot in plain language, or building from a completely blank canvas. Templates and Copilot are faster for common patterns; blank gives you full control once you know what you're doing.