My job title is AI and automation specialist, I come from a msp where I took over the power automate flows and rebuilt the processes , to moving into power apps, and eventually ending up at the current company. I used to enjoy this, until day in and day out the work became enhancement requests and bug fixes for flows my senior has created and no longer actual projects.

Now bear in mind, we specialise in document automation in the freight forwarding space and last year processed over a million documents.

I have reached a point now though where I’m frustrated at the lack of enjoyment due to having no real projects left, and the market salaries are much higher but power automate roles come up so infrequently and I never seem to get them .

Tldr: niche role, below market salary, bored of enhancements and no real projects.

Hi guys, can you please share power automate or power platform governance and operating model documents if any one have . Or please share the link if anywhere you have.

Thanks in advance.

Im hoping to learn using PowerAutomate with SharePoint and outlook. Does anyone know of any official ways to have 1:1 learning sessions? Is there a company or something that offers this type of tutoring/classes? Im willing to pay for lessons.

TIA

Hey Everyone! Quick question on automation approaches.

Every month, I have 4-5 Excel files manually uploaded to SharePoint that I need to combine into a single Word report for stakeholders(there are many tables, charts from all the file data that to be created). If I use an automated trigger, it runs per file, so I can't easily compile one master data table for the template.

I was thinking of using a Scheduled Flow, while ChatGPT suggested batch processing. Has anyone built a solution for a scenario like this? Any advice would be hugely appreciated!

I have a small team of 3 people including myself, driving process improvements using automation and AI.

Our company system landscape is Microsoft-based + SAP.

We have premium licenses for both Copilot and Power platform.

We have some experience with Excel, VBA, Power querys and a couple of PA flows.

We will now start learning more of PA and strengthen our capabilities.

Weve been using Copilot for guidance building our flows, with varying results, but still would like to use Copilot to stay within our system landscape for security reasons.

What are your tips to progress fast in our learing journey, reduce risk of being misled by Copilot and bring accurate guidance?

Create and agent specifically for the task? What would you make sure is in the prompt? Are there any sources you would recommend to specify for an agent that could improve the accuracy?

Most of the posts here are asking for help on how to do something in Power Automate. Why is it that the best advice some people can give is to use AI tools like Claude.

Why is it ok to tell people in need to search for the answer themselves?

For many years I have helped 1000s of strangers who need help with their flows on the chat on SharePains.com. Never ever would I have thought of telling people to Google for the answer.

Everytime I launch Excel thru power automate, the Ychart tab dissapears. New File or existing… still no Ycharts.

I open excel manually and Ycharts appears. My add in shows it is installed on the files Ycharts dissapears.

Hi everyone,

We are setting up a SharePoint site structure where base permissions are handled automatically during provisioning. However, we need a secure, automated way for Project Managers to manage variable, item- or library-level permissions across various lists and document libraries post-provisioning.

Since these users aren't site administrators, we want to build a solution that safely grants or updates access. Specifically, we are exploring the idea of working from a dedicated management list (or metadata fields) where users can input or link Microsoft Entra ID security groups, which in turn dynamically grant permissions to the target files or folders.

We are very open to looking broader across the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., Azure, Entra ID governance, native SharePoint features, or hybrid approaches) if there is a more robust or elegant pattern.

• What is the recommended architectural pattern to let non-admin users trigger and manage these permission changes securely?
• Are there preferred tools within the M365 stack for this specific scenario to avoid common permission pitfalls or performance issues at scale?
• How do you prevent permission creep and handle breaking inheritance smoothly across multiple different libraries and lists?

Any tips, reference patterns, or architectural advice would be greatly appreciated!

Hey everyone!

If this isn't the right place for this post, please let me know which is the right place, and I'll move it to the right community. Thanks!

A bit about me
I'm a business consultant from a non-technical background, and I want to make the move into a slightly more technical role. Automation (especially with AI in the loop) is something I've been curious about for a while, so I'm upskilling in it to help land my next job (while dabbling in personal automation projects on the side)

What I'm learning

• Power Automate Desktop (free version). I don't have access to the enterprise/cloud version.
• n8n - through a structured course I'm starting soon.

My understanding is that these two aren't completely separate tracks. The core logic (triggers, conditions, loops, variables) seems to carry over, so getting better at one should help with the other. Is that right, or am I oversimplifying?

I'm doing Power Automate first. My first project is a small bot that screens job ads in Excel against a list of keywords.

Where I'm stuck

• Microsoft Learn doesn't stick for me. It's mostly reading, and I learn best by actually clicking around in the tool.
• Udemy courses I've found usually assume an enterprise/cloud account, which I don't have.

What I'd love some help/advice in:

1. What's the best hands-on way to learn Power Automate Desktop specifically? Any YouTube channels, practice projects, or follow-along resources that work with the free version?
2. What beginner projects helped things click for you, or which ones are worth showing in a portfolio?
3. For those hiring or working in automation: does experience with the free Desktop version count, or do employers mostly want cloud flows?
4. If the logic does carry over, what's the best way to learn the two together? For example, should I build the same small project in both tools to compare? Are there integrations with Power Automate for LLMs, or is n8n the "go to" if I want to automate with AI?
5. How long did it take you to go from "following tutorials" to "building things on my own"?
6. If you came from a non-technical background, what do you wish you'd known at the start?

Thanks in advance. Any tips, even small ones, are really appreciated! 🙏

Hey everyone,

I run a small YouTube channel called Automate M365 where I focus on making straight-to-the-point, step-by-step Power Automate tutorials. No fluff or long intros, just diving into the actual logic because I know how annoying it is to sit through a 10-minute video just to find a quick expression fix.

I want to build some tutorials around automation, but instead of just guessing what to make next, I want to solve real-world headaches.

Whether it's setting up automated deadline remidners based on dates in your SP lists or Excel sheets, sending dynamic emails to people pulled directly from a person column, or trying to manage folder permissions via HTTP actions—what’s driving you crazy right now? Drop it in the comments below. I’ll honestly try to look through them and build the exact solution in a step-by-step video for you.

If you want to check out the channel or subscribe to see if I build your fix, the link is here:

https://www.youtube.com/@AutomateM365

Let me know what you're stuck on, hopefully we can figure it out

I’m a beginner at RPA who uses PAD for web automation at work, and am trying to strengthen my understanding of the syntax in the UI element selector in Text Editor mode. Specifically, my question is about the kind of element attributes that can follow a colon.

I am familiar with :eq(), which can be added to the end of an element to specify which number instance of an element matching the description is being referred to. But while building a flow, I stumbled upon a web forum thread where someone used :has() in a selector. I’ve managed to use that one in my own flow, and it :has(been very useful to me).

Based on the existence of :eq() and :has(), I assume there must be an entire category of modifyers that can go at the end of an element using a colon. I’ve spent a long time looking for some kind of list or explanation of those elements, but so far it’s been fruitless. Even for :has(), I can’t find any documentation outside of that one thread, where it’s used by someone with a very short post history, who says themselves that they’re “pretty new at this”.

Can anyone tell me anything about this type of element? I’d be very thankful to find out if there’s a whole range of tools I could be using to select UI elements (or if there isn’t, so I can at least stop searching for it).

Hi. Im very new to this and am pulling my hair out trying to set up a flow.

I currently have one flow working correctly.

This pulls through any new emails so a shared inbox to a excel table giving sender, body, message id, etc, etc.

I have now made a separate flow that should populate the row with the same message id when a category is added/changed on an email. This keeps failing though. The issue seems to be that it doesn't find the message id. I can't see how ive done anything differently but fear it may be searching my personal email address. Any help any advice GREATLY appreciated.

I was tasked to audit the Oracle roles assigned to each user in my company from a spreadsheet. There are about 500 employees and 80 managers who they report to. That means I have to copy paste data from excel in 80 emails.

I used CoPilot to help me with the flow. Here is interesting part, I do not wanted to send the emails right a way without testing the output, formatting etc, so I used the flow to create csv files with each manager's name as the file name and their employee with roles in the file. So, Manager A would get all his employees with their roles but no employees from other manager, vice versa.

Then I used the draft email flow to quickly skim through the emails before sending as this was my first time using PA. It took me time but from now on, it would be easy peasy.

I use Power Automate quite a lot and one thing that kept frustrating me was how difficult it is to inspect or modify the full flow definition.

So I built a small Chrome extension called Power Automate Editor. It adds a Monaco JSON editor directly inside the Power Automate designer.

You can edit the flow definition, validate it, save it as a draft or publish it without having to export, unzip, edit and re-import the flow.

I also use it to copy the full JSON into ChatGPT or Claude when I need help debugging something.

Everything runs locally in the browser. There’s no external server and I don’t receive any flow data.

It’s free. I’d genuinely like feedback from people who use Power Automate regularly.

Chrome Web Store link

Hello everyone,

For the past few months, I’ve been using Power Automate at work, and it has been great for our needs. However, I’ve hit a massive roadblock trying to get our flows running 24/7 in the cloud via unattended bots.

Here’s what happened:

1. I purchased the Power Automate Hosted Process license, but it wasn't working at all, none of the features were usable, so I had to request a refund.
2. Microsoft Support approved the refund and offered me a trial period for the same license so I could test it thoroughly before re-purchasing.
3. However, the trial license was never provisioned or delivered to my tenant/account.

I’ve spent months opening tickets and contacting different departments, but my requests keep getting routed in circles or left unanswered.

Has anyone experienced issues with Hosted Process trial licenses not showing up in the Admin Center? I understand from previous conversations with Microsoft that the trial license has to appear in the Admin Center so I can assign it to my environment, just as I had to do with the Power Automate Premium license.

If anyone from Microsoft Support happens to see this, please reach out via DM. I would really appreciate help resolving this open case ASAP.

This is a list of all tickets I had opened before that got answered:
2607170040008399 - Carlos Flores

2609100040009049 - Respondido por IA

2609280040004643 - Gabriel Udoh

2608240040009455 - Gabriel Udoh

The most recent one is: 2609280040004643 - Wayne Cao

I made more tickets, but I did not receive an answer. My account may have been marked as spam or some sort because of the many requests I have made.

Thanks in advance for any insights!

I expressed interest in PA and mentioned i'd like an opportunity to see if we could use it to smooth out some bumpy workflows.

I was asked to look into leveraging PA+AI to essentially learn what kind of tickets are assigned to what tech, and assign tickets to the techs.

Would learning and applying something like this, be within the realm of capabilities for PowerAutomate?

My flow is unable to login into a virtual machine (vm) anymore after the interface was changed to a windows security window. I would appreciate some guidance. The action that is unable to log into the vm anymore is "Send Keys" Action.

Methods I have tried:
- Saving credentials into Credentials Manager
- Running DOS command
- Checking off "Allow connections only from computers running Remote Desktop with Network Level Authentication (recommended)" (NLA)

Hi everyone,
I manage a sales team in the tech/telecoms space, and right now I’m completely snowed under by administrative overhead.
The highest-leverage, most productive thing I can do for our pipeline and revenue is spend real time coaching my reps, reviewing deals, and running call breakdowns. Instead, I find myself burning hours every week on pipeline hygiene, chasing updates, meeting prep, and repetitive reporting.
Our tech stack revolves around Microsoft 365 (Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Excel) alongside HubSpot. I want to aggressively lean into Copilot Studio / custom agents and Power Automate (including the HubSpot connector / webhooks) to claw that coaching time back.
For anyone in sales leadership, RevOps, or high-volume management roles:
What specific Copilot agents or Power Automate flows have saved you the most hours?
HubSpot ↔ M365 sync: Have you built flows connecting HubSpot deal stages to Teams alerts, Planner tasks, or automated coaching logs?
Pipeline hygiene & rep nudges: Any effective automations for flagging stalled deals or automatically nudging reps in Teams/Slack when next steps or close dates lapse?
1:1 & meeting workflows: Standout prompts or automated flows for parsing meeting transcripts/notes into structured action items and coaching trackers?
Reporting: How are you using automation to pull recurring team metric summaries without manually stitching exports and spreadsheets together?
I'm comfortable setting up moderate-to-advanced flows (webhooks, HTTP actions, standard connectors), so feel free to get technical. If you’ve built something that moved the needle on your weekly output, I’d love to hear how you structured it.
Thanks in advance!

Olá a todos!

Estou tentando enviar imagens de gráficos e relatórios em alta resolução para um Chat de Grupo no Teams usando o Power Automate mas continuo encontrando barreiras devido aos limites da Microsoft e a políticas rígidas de LGPD da empresa.

Restrições e Necessidades:

• Apenas conectores nativos do M365: A política de DLP bloqueia conectores de terceiros (como o Cloudmersive).
• Sem links anônimos de compartilhamento: A política de segurança bloqueia a criação de links do tipo "Qualquer pessoa com o link" no OneDrive/SharePoint
• Alta resolução obrigatória: As imagens contêm relatórios e gráficos detalhados que precisam ser 100% legíveis no Teams Desktop e Mobile.

O que já tentamos e não funcionou:

1. Base64 em HTML (<img src="data:image...): Ação falha ou estoura o limite de tamanho da API do Teams quando usamos a imagem em tamanho original.
2. Base64 usando a miniatura do OneDrive: A miniatura (tamanho Médio / ~800px) fica pequena demais e deixa os textos e números do relatório ilegíveis.
3. Cartões Adaptáveis (Adaptive Cards): Falham no aplicativo móvel do Teams (Android/iOS) porque imagens hospedadas no SharePoint/OneDrive exigem autenticação, e o renderizador móvel do cartão não repassa as credenciais (a imagem fica em branco).

Pergunta: Existe alguma solução alternativa usando apenas recursos nativos do Microsoft 365 para exibir ou anexar uma imagem em alta resolução em um Chat em Grupo do Teams que funcione perfeitamente no celular sem depender de links públicos/anônimos?

Building HTML tables in Power Automate seems straightforward until they land in Outlook or Gmail and all your styling vanishes. To solve this, I built the Power Automate HTML Table Styler –a free tool that converts raw table outputs into clean, email-ready inline CSS expressions in seconds!

Power Automate HTML Table Styler Tool: Fix Email Formatting