From the course: Business Automation Tips with Microsoft Flow

What is Flow? - Power Automate Tutorial

From the course: Business Automation Tips with Microsoft Flow

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What is Flow?

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- [Instructor] So let's start with a little background. Just what is Flow anyways? Well, Microsoft's description is fairly good. Microsoft Flow is an online workflow service that automates actions across the most common apps and services. Now, what this means is that you can use Flow to tie processes and events together between different programs. I'll give you an example and this is something that we're actually going to build in just a little bit. Let's say that you'd like to save attachments from emails into a folder in OneDrive. Rather than having to download and save each file in each email manually, flow can automate the procedure. There are hundreds of connectors available for some of the most popular and widely used business tools out there. Things like SalesForce, DropBox, Twitter, even Google. And even better, many of the most useful and obvious automated routines are already created and ready for you in the form of templates. Setting up some are as simple as clicking a button. Others require a little bit more work, but it's an easy process. And not only can you tweak flows to get your needed, desired results, you can build your own custom flows to fit your own, individual needs. Even better, flows can be shared or saved as templates so that other people on your team can use them too. All in all, flow is a simple-to-use, yet incredibly powerful tool that allows you to quickly create very useful automated routines for yourself and others. Not bad, huh? Now, one disclaimer. In this course, I'm going to be really focused on creating specific flows. I'm not going to go into great depth about flow itself and all of the bells and whistles. If you want a more detailed explanation of how Flow works and more of a deep dive into working with it, I'm going to recommend you check out some of the other courses available in the library online. For instance, Gini von Courter has a learning Microsoft Flow course that spends more time on the nuts and bolts that I will. There's also a ton of information available directly from Microsoft on the Flow homepage.

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