Power Automate Cloud Flows designer using Copilot | Now in GA

As Microsoft rolled out using Power Automate Cloud Flows designer using Copilot on 8th Nov 2023, here’s a look at how you can use it in your scenarios while designing Cloud Flows!

Copilot in Power Automate

As you might have noticed by now (based on the currently supported region you are in), Copilot is enabled in Power Automate Flow Designer directly!

You’ll notice that the Designer’s look and feel is new and refined than the previous UI. Of course, I’ll need time to get familiar with this in coming days. 😊
But I’ll share with you what I learnt so far.
Next, when you click on the Step, the Properties are on a left hand side pane so you don’t see a menu dropping down in your screen as before which needed you to scroll that used to make your Action go above the screen from the top
Once the Property pane appears, you can select the different types of Triggers available from the Runtime menu which was previously a Tab within the Action selection dialog box.
On the right hand side, you can see the Copilot button to show and hide the Copilot pane where you can type in your Commands.
Example, I can type in a query in natural language to retrieve records from Dataverse, for example. Here’s how it looks.
My request is then turned into an appropriate trigger retrieving the correct information I was looking for.
And if I check what was retrieved, I can click on this trigger to reveal the Properties and verify/change if I need to.
In case there’s something that isn’t clear to understand. You won’t be returned with any action taken on the Flow itself – probably you
Then, you can simply click on the thumbs down icon and submit your feedback.
I faced an issue while submitting Feedback but I think I might be missing something or this is being fixed still.
Further, here’s how the Add an action works – it simply reveals the pane on the right hand side which was previously a flyout menu.

Overall, the visual improvement helps in identifying with the structural flow of logic better and I’m looking forward for more updates on this is coming days/weeks and months!

For now, you can always go back to the classic designer by clicking on the ellipses and then selecting

Here’s a link to the Microsoft post on the announcement of this feature – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-platform/release-plan/2023wave2/power-automate/use-power-automate-cloud-flows-designer-copilot?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5003911

Hope this helps!

Here are some Power Automate posts you want to check out –

Thank you!

Tracked Properties in Power Automate Flow Step

January 23, 2023 priyeshwagh777 Power Automate power automate flow, tracked properties, tracked properties in flow, tracked properties in flow step settings, tracked properties in power automate

If you are new to Power Automate and are wondering how Tracked Properties are and how they work?

Tracked Properties are data properties which are hidden away from the Input/Output sections of the Flow and which you can explicitly retrieve in a Flow Run.

Here’s a post to explain the same!

Tracked Properties

Below are what Tracked Properties are –

If you look at the Settings section of different Actions, you’ll see Tracked Properties.
And you’ll see Tracked Properties at the bottom once all Action specific Settings are listed.
Here, you can create and store your own properties and it’s value. It’s value could also be results of preceding steps or from expressions.
See example below –
Once you create these Properties, here’s how you can retrieve the same.

Retrieving Tracked Properties

Here’s how you can retrieve Tracked Properties –

You need to address using actions() method in Power Automate to read Tracked Properties of a certain step.
Hence, the syntax is “action('<stepname>')?['TrackedProperties']“
You can store it in an Object variable and see the result as below
Or, if you want to retrieve only a specific property, you can mention the same in the expressions itself.
And it’ll show up like this (In anything stores Integer / String)

Hope this helps!

Here are some Power Automate posts you want to check out –

Thank you!

Get Display Name of the current Flow in Power Automate

October 8, 2022 priyeshwagh777 Power Automate name of the flow in power automate, power automate flow, workflow function in power automate

If you are working on complex Flows and need to identify which Flow a certain operation is being performed from –

Example, you are working on some Account Processing Flow you designed for Dataverse tables and there are several Flows for the Account table, but you want to start logging errors from different Flows for developer reference.

workflow() function

Here’s how you can use the workflow() function in Power Automate Flow to get the name of the current Flow –

Here’s the name of the Flow which we are intending to get in the Flow run itself.
In this example, I’m initializing a variable of type String to Demonstrate this
Now, you have workflow() function in the Expressions area in Dynamic Content in your Flow step.
Once you select the workflow() function, you can continue to type in even though you are not seeing auto-complete options. Type .tags.flowDisplayName further as shown below
And click OK, make sure by hovering that the expressions is added.
And when you Run the Flow to test, you can get the Name of the Flow itself.
Also, you can get the other properties from the workflow() function as well. Here’s an example when you just use workflow() function and see the results –