Flowwijzer
Cheat sheet

Power Automate cheat sheet

Everything you often look up while building a flow, on one page. Handy next to your screen or on paper.

Download as PDFView the lessons

The building blocks

  • Trigger the starting signal. Every flow has exactly one.
  • Action does something: save, email, post a message.
  • Condition a yes/no question. The actions then run in the True or False box.
  • Dynamic content: data from earlier steps, such as the name of an attachment.
  • Loop (Apply to each): repeats the actions inside it for every item in a list.

Common triggers

  • When a new email arrives (V3), Outlook
  • Manually trigger a flow, for testing or with a button
  • Recurrence, at a fixed time, for example every Monday at 8:00
  • When a file is created, OneDrive or SharePoint
  • When a new response is submitted, Microsoft Forms

Common actions

  • Send an email (V2), Outlook
  • Create file, OneDrive or SharePoint
  • Post message in a chat or channel, Teams
  • Start and wait for an approval, Approvals
  • List rows present in a table, Excel
  • Add a row into a table, Excel
  • Initialize variable, store a value temporarily

Comparisons in a condition

  • is equal to
  • contains
  • begins with and ends with
  • is greater than and is less than

Note: with is equal to, upper and lower case matter. Use toLower() to make text comparable.

Handy expressions

utcNow()The current date and time (UTC)
convertTimeZone(utcNow(), 'UTC', 'Eastern Standard Time', 'MM-dd-yyyy')Today's date in your own time zone
formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'yyyy-MM-dd')A date in a specific format
addDays(utcNow(), 7)The date 7 days from now
concat('Invoice_', 'April')Join pieces of text together
toLower(text) / toUpper(text)Lower case or upper case
trim(text)Remove spaces before and after the text
replace(text, 'old', 'new')Replace a piece of text
substring(text, 0, 4)The first 4 characters of a text
length(text)The number of characters, or the number of items in a list
empty(text)True if the text is empty
if(equals(a, b), 'yes', 'no')A choice inside a single step
coalesce(a, b)The first value that is not empty

Click in a field and choose the fx button on the right for an expression, or the lightning bolt for dynamic content. Function names are always in English.

Date format

  • yyyy year, for example 2026
  • MM month, for example 10
  • dd day, for example 04
  • HH hour (24-hour) and mm minutes

Note: MM is the month and mm is the minutes. Example: yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm gives 2026-10-04 14:30.

When it goes wrong

  • Where to look? My flows, open the flow, choose Run history (the last 28 days) and open the step with the red exclamation mark.
  • 401 or 403: connection expired or no permission. Sign in again under Data, Connections.
  • 404: folder, file or table not found or renamed.
  • 400: a required field is empty or has a wrong value.
  • Flow does not start: is it turned on in My flows?

Tips

  • Build small: start with one trigger and one action and expand step by step.
  • Test often: use the manual trigger or a test email before the flow really goes live.
  • Give steps a clear name, so you can see at a glance later what the flow does.
  • Make a copy of a working flow before you experiment.
  • Use test files instead of real company data.

Microsoft changes the Power Automate interface regularly. Names of menus and buttons may therefore differ slightly. The English names are used here.

Cheat sheet from flowwijzer.nl/en/ · You can find more lessons and explanations on the site.

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