More than three years ago, I delivered a session at Virtual Scottish Summit 2021 focused on Power Automate: Best Practices, Tips, and Tricks. During that session, I encouraged attendees to reflect on their existing Power Automate flows. In addition, I walked through a set of must‑have best practices, practical tips, and useful tricks. Ultimately, these recommendations help you build more reliable, maintainable, and effective automation flows.
📝 One-Minute Brief
Watch this Power Automate best practices video to learn tips, tricks, and patterns for building reliable automation workflows.
For sure, I need to update my Power Automate slides and session, especially since we now have a new Flow design and, at a visual level, many things are different. Of course, there are new features. Don’t get me wrong, but… I’m amazed and happy to see that after 3 years, all those best practices, tips, and tricks are still essential and very useful:
- Power Automate flow naming convention: Use descriptive names. They improve readability.
- Actions naming convention: Use descriptive names. They improve readability.
- Add comments: They improve readability.
- Copy to my clipboard: Easy way to Duplicate Actions or Scope.
- Using scopes: Scopes allow us to group actions together and much more. The scope also allows you to implement try-catch-finally mechanisms.
- Error handling… configure run after settings: The ability to set action(s) after a failure or define retry policies
- Learn from failures: You should analyze the run history from time to time and learn from failures… or mistakes.
- Expressions nightmare: Basic operations you can use inside flow actions or conditions.
- Flow checker: The Flow Designer performs design-time checks against your flow for design issues.
- Send a copy: Share a flow without sharing a connection.
- Share with other users or security groups: Share a flow between your team or company.
I hope you find this helpful! If you liked the content or found it useful and want to help me write more, you can buy (or help me buy) my son a Star Wars Lego!
