Power Automate Training
This page contains information on all of the training that we provide on Power Automate.
Power Automate classroom training
We have the following classroom training courses:
See details of our classroom training, or why not organise your own onsite Power Automate course?
Online Power Automate training
You can take the following online Power Automate courses:
Or see how our online courses work (probably better than you think!).
Which is the right Power Automate course for you?
If you're not sure whether you should be using Power Automate, Power Automate Desktop, both or neither, here's a quick comparison!
You can see a longer comparison in this blog, which tries to show in more details the differences between these two products which have such deceptively similar names!
Power Automate Desktop
The purpose of Power Automate Desktop is to create flows like this one:
As it happens, this flow would open Excel, read in some data from a workbook and then close Excel down again.
Power Automate allows you to read from (or write to) parts of web browser or other application forms:
You can select any part of a web page or application, and either write text in to it or read from it.
You can use loops, conditions and variables, although there's no language to learn:
This program is looping over a range of Excel cells, doing something for each (and using variables to hold the intermediate values).
Here are most of the commands that you can use in Power Automate:
The commands that you select from.
However, each of these commands contains a host of subcommands. Here as one example is what you get if you choose Mouse and keyboard:
The mouse and keyboard events that you can automate.
The best way to think of Power Automate is this: that it does for the whole of Windows what VBA macros do for Excel.
Power Automate
Whereas Power Automate Desktop is designed to automate things that you do on your computer, Power Automate allows you to create cloud flows. Typical applications that you might want to automatie could include:
| Applications | Notes |
|---|---|
| File storage | Cloud flows can move, copy, rename and delete files and folders, providing that you give them access to the relevant storage sites. Typically you might use Power Automate to save data in SharePoint, OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive or any other cloud storage medium. |
| Email servers | If you use a cloud-based app like GMail or Outlook to manage your messages, you can link to it to download emails, save attachments and create rules for processing incoming emails (to give just a few ideas). |
| Social media | Provided that you have the security rights to connect to a social media platform, you can interrogate it. A typical use of this might be to monitor Twitter for a particular hashtag's use. |
| Collaboration | Obvious collaborative software to play around with in flows would be Teams (so you could automatically add approved holidays to your organisation's Teams calendar, for example). |
The best way to see what you might use a Power Automate flow for is to have a look at some of the template flows provided:
A (very) small sample of templates for flows that you can create in Power Automate.
Another good way to understand what you might do within a Power Automate flow is to have a look at some of the connectors available:
Some of the most popular things you might connect to are OneDrive, Excel 365 and SharePoint.
Crucial to Power Automate is the concept of triggering flows with actions:
Just a few ideas for things you could do to trigger a flow.
Any flow consists of a range of possible actions, and this is where Power Automate becomes more like its sister program Power Automate Desktop:
Some of the actions that you can do for Excel Online, for example.
What the above shows is that you would typically learn Power Automate Desktop to automate things that you do from your desktop computer and Power Automate to automate things that you do in the cloud, but in practice there are often big overlaps between the functionality of the two products.
10 things our Power Automate courses include
Each of our scheduled courses (whether classroom or online) includes:
- Small course sizes - we have a maximum of 6 people on each classroom or online course.
- A trainer! And not just anyone - our courses are only ever given by full-time Wise Owls.
- Full colour courseware and exercises of oustanding quality.
- A no cancellation guarantee (once you've booked and confirmed your training course, it will run).
- A one gigabyte USB stick, containing course files, answers to exercises and (by the end of the course) your answers too, together with a nice pen.
- Unofficial help after the course (although we don't have a dedicated post-course support line, in practice trainers will be happy to answer the odd ad hoc question after a course has taken place).
- A certificate sent out digitally or in paper form (your choice) after each course, together with (for tailored courses) the trainer's thoughts on how the course went.
In addition, our classroom courses also include:
- A computer for each delegate (obviously).
- Lunch out each day at a local restaurant (chosen on the day of the course, after discussion!).
- Unlimited refreshments during the day, including Tassimo or Nespresso coffee and a range of biscuits and snacks to keep you going through those dark afternoon hours.
Still not convinced? You can read hundreds of testimonials to the quality of our training (all attributed and added in the last 3 years.
Other Power Automate training resources
There are many ways in which we can help you learn Power Automate, as the list below shows.
Try our Power Automate exercises
You can test your knowledge of Power Automate with these exercises.
Power Automate courseware manuals
See our range of Power Automate courseware.
Blogs on Power Automate
We have the following blogs on Power Automate to help you.
Power Automate training venues
Here are the venues for our Power Automate courses.