Welcome once again to another Power Automate Best Practices, Tips, and Tricks. In my previous blog posts, I talked about some of the most essential best practices you should have while working with the Power Automate:
And some tips and tricks:
Of course, the most recurring task is adding notes to our triggers and actions, but it is always good to know how to delete them. Some of you may be thinking that it is a trivial task, as simple as adding a note. But, unfortunately, I have to say that nothing is that trivial in Power Automate (PA), even this fundamental task.
📝 One-Minute Brief
Learn how to correctly delete notes in Power Automate. Although it looks simple, removing notes is not as intuitive as adding them. This tip shows the proper method to delete notes without leaving hidden metadata behind, helping you keep flows clean, readable, and easy to maintain.
# Delete notes
As I mentioned in #3 Add notes (previously comments), is it essential to add notes to all our actions, or at least in the most important ones? And the reasons for that are:
Notes improve readability
By setting notes in your actions, you can quickly identify what the action is intended for and what it is doing, without needing to read all the settings inside the action to try to figure it out. And sometimes, that may not be enough, and you still need to go to some documentation (API documentation, project documentation, and so on) to understand.
By implementing this best practice, you will improve readability and save time (by not spending considerable time looking at the details and configurations in your actions) and frustration. You may think that this is not important. You have created the Power Automate flow. You know the business logic inside and what shapes represent or are used for, but once again, trust me, you will completely forget it after 3 months or a week!
Notes also help transfer knowledge between your team or organization
Sometimes, Power Automate flows are shared by a team, or you are a consultant creating these resources for your client. They also need to be aware of them. They also need to understand them. You may leave the project or the company in the future, and they will need to continue the work or make future changes. Having a good note policy in place for the actions is also a way to auto-document your processes.
But sometimes, we may find some of them unnecessary or repeating something already mentioned above, and we want to delete them. So, the main question we want to address on this tip is: How can we delete an existing note?
So let’s assume that we have an existing note on one of our actions, like the one we see in the picture below:
The first reaction we can have to eliminate the note is to press the X button, as you may see in the video below:
And at the first glint, it seems the X button deletes the note, but in reality, it doesn’t! So if you close the designer and reopen it, you will see the note is still there. Or if you click in the … (3 dots) and select Edit note, you will see the note is, once again, still there – note that it doesn’t present the option to add a note, only edit.
In reality, the X button is just a way to hide the note – probably Microsoft’s icon choice was not the best. Instead of an X, they could put a collapse or hidden icon, but that is another story.
How to delete notes?
To delete an existing note on one of our actions or triggers is quite simple. However, the deletion process seems a bit ridiculous.
To do that, we need to:
- On our action or trigger, select the … (3 dots), and from the menu, select the Edit note option.
- After selecting that option, you will see the note in edit mode.
- Note: if the note is not visible, the note will appear on the shape in edit mode.
- To delete the note, select and delete all text inside the note textbox – you will see the label Add a short note – press Enter or click outside the note textbox to remove the existing note.
- Note that spaces are valid characters in notes.
Do not forget to save the changes, but after that, the note will no longer appear in your Power Automate flow.
Stay tuned for the following Power Automate Best practices, Tips, and Tricks.
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