Tech Ideas & Best Practices

Welcome to Microsoft Power Apps. This self-paced, online module helps you build apps from the ground up.

In this module, you will:

• Explore how Power Apps can make your business more efficient.
• Learn which technologies to use to perform tasks in Power Apps.
• Learn about the different ways to build an app in Power Apps.
• Create your first app from data in a Microsoft Excel workbook.

In this introductory module, you'll learn how to create an app from data in an Excel workbook. As a prerequisite, you'll download a workbook that contains sample data. Next, you'll upload the workbook to Microsoft OneDrive for Business, where you can share the data with others. Then, you'll build the app without using code.

Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, connectors, and a data platform that provides you with an opportunity to build custom apps for your business needs. By using Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your business data that is stored either in the underlying data platform (Common Data Service) or in various online and on-premises data sources (SharePoint, Excel, Office 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on).

Apps that are built by using Power Apps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business processes to digital, automated processes. Power Apps simplifies the custom business app building experience by enabling users to build feature-rich apps without writing code.

Power Apps also provides an extensible platform that lets pro developers programmatically interact with data and metadata, apply business logic, create custom connectors, and integrate with external data.

With Power Apps, you can:

• Build an app quickly by using the skills that you already have.
• Connect to the cloud services and data sources that you're already using.
• Share your apps instantly so that coworkers can use them on their phones and tablets.

When it comes to using Power Apps to get things done and keep people informed, your options are nearly limitless. The following examples can help you think about how to use an app, instead of traditional paper notes, to run your business:

• Equipment in the field -Often, company representatives who visit customers in the field carry clipboards to help guarantee a paper trail of parts with scheduled replacement dates. By running an app on a tablet, reps can look up the customer's equipment, see a picture of a part, test and analyze the part, and then order new parts. Reps can perform these tasks on-site instead of leaving the customer's warehouse.
• Restaurant employee management - Employees of a large restaurant might fill out work schedules and vacation requests on a piece of paper that's affixed to a wall. With Power Apps running on everyone's smartphone, employees can open the app to record the same information, anywhere, anytime. The app can even send reminders for the start of the next day's shift.

If you're a beginner with Power Apps, this module gets you going quickly; if you're familiar with Power Apps, it ties concepts together and fills in the gaps.

Power Apps building blocks

Power Apps is a collection of services, apps, and connectors that work together to let you do much more than just view your data. You can act on your data and update it anywhere and from any device.

To create, share, and administer apps, you'll use the following sites:

• Make a Power App - On this site, you can open apps, specify the type of app that you want to create, share your app, and create data connections and flows. To use this site, you'll need to log in by using your organizational account.
• Power Apps Studio - On this site, you build apps by configuring user interface (UI) elements and Excel-like formulas.
• Power Apps admin center - On this site, you'll define environments and data policies.

Note:

To use these sites, you'll need to sign in by using your organizational account.

When you've completed your tasks, you can run your apps in a browser or in Power Apps Mobile (available for Windows tablets, iOS devices, and Android devices).

Related Blogs

Checkout our other blogs related to building Power Apps:

Ways to Build Power Apps: A Beginner’s Guide

Designing a Power Apps app

Top 10 best use cases for Power Automate

This unit explores each part of the following Power Apps components:

• Power Apps Home Page - Apps start here, whether you build them from data, a sample app, or a blank screen.
• Power Apps Studio - Develop your apps further by connecting to data, adding and arranging user interface (UI) elements (known as controls), and building formulas.
• Power Apps Mobile - Run your apps on Microsoft Windows, Apple iOS, and Google Android devices.
• Power Apps Admin Center - Manage Power Apps environments and other components.

Power Apps Home Page

If you are building an app, you'll start with the Power Apps Home Page. You can build apps from sample apps, templates, or a blank screen. All the apps that you've built appear here, along with any apps that others have created and shared with you.

Power Apps Studio

Power Apps Studio is where you can fully develop your apps to make them more effective as a business tool and to make them more attractive. Power Apps Studio has three panes that make creating apps seem more like building a slide deck in Microsoft PowerPoint:

• Left pane - Shows a hierarchical view of all the controls on each screen or a thumbnail for each screen in your app.
• Middle pane - Shows the canvas app that you're working on.
• Right pane - Where you set options such as the layout, properties, and data sources for certain controls.

Power Apps Mobile

Power Apps Mobile for Windows, iOS, and Android devices allows you to use all the apps that you've created, and those others have shared with you, on your mobile device. You or your users can download the Microsoft Power Apps app from the appropriate app store. When users log in with their credentials, they will see all apps that have been shared with them. The Power Apps Mobile app only needs to be downloaded once.

When you use apps in Power Apps Mobile, you get the most out of your device's capabilities: camera controls, GPS location, and more.

Power Platform admin center

The Power Platform admin center is the centralized place for managing Power Apps for an organization. On this site, you can define and manage different environments to house the apps. For example, you might have separate environments for development and production apps. Additionally, you can define data connections and manage environment roles and data policies.

Licensing

Most users get their initial start with Power Apps by utilizing one of the licenses that come with their Microsoft 365 Plan or Microsoft Dynamics 365 license. These licenses allow you to extend the functionality of the app that is licensed. This means if you purchased a Microsoft 365 plan that included a Power Apps license then you can build apps that extend and use SharePoint as a data source. But Power Apps doesn’t have to stop at just extending that platform.

Power Apps has over 300 available data source connectors available including Common Data Service. To incorporate Common Data Service or any of those additional connectors all users of the app will need a premium license. There are two different ways to acquire a Premium license:

• Per App model
• Per User model.

The Per App license plan allows individual users to run two applications and one portal for a specific business scenario in a specific environment based on the full capabilities of Power Apps with access to premium connectors. The Per User license plan allows users to run unlimited premium licensed apps. This gives you the ability to grow with Power Apps and control costs by purchasing the license that best matches your business goals.

In addition, Power Apps also has the capability to use Power Apps portals to build externally or internally facing websites using Common Data Service and Power Apps controls. Power Apps portals have their own licensing model and are not included in any of the licenses discussed previously above. With Power Portals you will purchase a capacity based license to meet your business needs.

Review the following links about licensing.

Microsoft Power Apps pricing

Microsoft Power Automate pricing

Microsoft Power Apps portals pricing.

Related Blogs

Checkout our other blogs related to building Power Apps:

Ways build power apps

Designing Power Apps app

Microsoft Power Apps works with other technologies to help you build powerful apps for your organization. Some of these technologies include:

• Data sources - Without data, you don't have a business. Data sources bring cloud and on-premises data into your apps. You access data through built-in connections, custom connectors, and gateways.
• Common Data Service - A compliant and scalable data service that's integrated into Power Apps.
• Power Automate - Allows you to build automated workflows to receive notifications, run processes, collect data, and more.

Data sources, connections, and gateways

In Power Apps, most canvas apps use external information that is stored in Data Sources. A common example is a table in an Excel file that is stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint. Apps access these data sources by using connections. Some connections allow Power Apps to read and write stored data. In Power Apps, you can add many data sources to your apps through built-in or custom connectors. Some of the most popular data sources are shown in the following figure.

Many data sources are cloud services, like Salesforce. Even Twitter can be a data source if, for example, you're tracking your company's hashtags. Connectors might not seem like the most exciting part of app development; however, they're essential when you work with data that you, your colleagues, and your customers care about. When an app shows up with your data source for the first time, you might suddenly find that they are, in fact, exciting.

For data that's stored on-premises instead of in the cloud, you can use a gateway to provide a reliable connection between Power Apps and your data source. The gateway sits on an on-premises computer and communicates with Power Apps.

An advantage of building your business apps in Power Apps is being able to connect to many data sources in a single app. With the connectors in Power Apps, you can connect to where your data lives. To learn more about data sources in Power Apps, refer to the Working With Data learning path.

Common Data Service

An important data source option to explore further is the Common Data Service. Common Data Service lets you store and manage data that's used by business applications. Data within Common Data Service is stored within a set of entities. An entity is a set of records that are used to store data, similar to how a table stores data within a database. Common Data Service includes a base set of standard entities that cover typical scenarios, but you can also create custom entities that are specific to your organization and then populate them with data by using Power Query. App makers can then use Power Apps to build rich applications by using this data.

For information on purchasing a plan to use Common Data Service, refer to the License and Pricing information pages.

Reasons to use Common Data Service

Standard and custom entities within Common Data Service provide a cloud-based storage option for your data. Entities let you create a business-focused definition of your organization's data for use within apps. If you're unsure if entities are your best option, consider the following benefits:

• Simple to manage - Both the metadata and data are stored in the cloud. You don't need to worry about the details of how they're stored.
• Helps to secure data - Data is stored so that users can see it only if you grant them access. Role-based security allows you to control access to entities for different users within your organization.
• Access your Dynamics 365 Data - Data from your Dynamics 365 applications is also stored within the Common Data Service, which allows you to quickly build apps that use your Dynamics 365 data and extend your apps by using Power Apps.
• Rich metadata - Data types and relationships are used directly within Power Apps.
• Logic and validation - Define calculated fields, business rules, workflows, and business process flows to ensure data quality and drive business processes.
• Productivity tools - Entities are available within the add-ins for Microsoft Excel to increase productivity and ensure data accessibility.

Related Power Platform technologies

As you continue developing your application, you may want to consider implementing additional Power Apps related technologies such as Power Automate and or Power BI. For example, you may have a simple Expense Report App that requires an approval before an item can be purchased. With Power Automate, you can create a simple Flow to make this happen. Or maybe you want to display your data with custom charts and graphs giving your users a more visual look into the data, which can often be useful. In this section, you will learn more about some of the other Power Platform technologies and how you could apply them in your own Power Apps solution. Keep in mind, if you decide to implement these Power Apps related technologies you should also review their licensing structure and associated costs.

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Power Automate

Power Automate brings automation to your business. This can be traditional workflows via flow, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for automating legacy systems via UI Flows, or business process automation via Business Process Flows. Each of these capabilities increases your productivity to connect disjointed systems to build the business solution you need and make your app more powerful.

You can use Power Automate to create logic that performs one or more tasks when an event occurs in a canvas app. For example, configure a button to execute a flow to do one of the following: create an item in a SharePoint list, send an email or meeting request, or add a file to OneDrive. The button could be configured to do all of those in a single Power Automate flow. You can configure any control in the app to start the flow, which continues to run even if you close Power Apps. Below is an example using Power Automate to send a flow:

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Identify Flows in your Solution

Now that you have a general overview of Power Automate, how do you determine if the solution you’re building requires a Flow? There are a number of simple functions Power Apps can do, like sending an email when a button is pressed in your application. This email generated from Power Apps can also contain dynamic/specific information and be sent to any email address you would like. Often, customers will use Power Automate to create this same functionality even though Power Apps can do this out of the box. Power Automate should be used for more complex solutions, such as the approval workflows. With Power Automate you can run an approval when a button is pressed, on a schedule, when an item is created or modified, and so on.

For many Power Apps solutions Power Automate is used to handle complex business logic. Do you need a way to make sure someone acted on the incident report that was generated by your app? Or, do you need a process to kick off every time new data is created in another system so Power Apps will have the data it needs? Do you need to check each morning to see if an inspection is due that day and then send an email with a link to your Power Apps inspection form? These are great uses of Power Automate to transform your app from a point solution to a fully featured business solution.

Power BI

Power BI is an analytics tool within the Power Platform suite. Power BI connects data from multiple sources and transforms the data into graphical visualizations to gain insights. It allows business users to utilize a number of different visualizations to build comprehensive reports and dashboards. When creating Power BI reports to view and analyze your app data, you have the ability to customize them for personal use and will only be accessible by you, providing you with a more unique and custom experience. If you need to share the report with others, you and each of the report consumer will need a Power BI Pro license. This license allows you to not only share the content but also control what others are able to do with the shared report or dashboard.

While Power Apps has capabilities to include simple graphs or tables, many solutions would be better served with a visualization provided by Power BI. Power Apps and Power BI have two options for seamless integration:

Embed a Power BI tile in a Power Apps app

By embedding a Power BI tile in a Power Apps solution, you are able to bring valuable visualizations into the app to allow the user to consume that data within the context of the app.

In the example below, you will see a simple Power BI Tile embedded in a Sales Planning app built in Power Apps. The visual is displaying the Profit and Gross Sales and the Power Apps form allows the user to enter sales predictions.

Embed a Power Apps app in a Power BI Dashboard

Another integration between these two applications, is to embed a Power Apps app in your Power BI report. This allows the user to act on data while never leaving the dashboard resulting in a better user experience. Consider an inventory management dashboard for a manufacturing facility. Without leaving the dashboard, the user can submit to purchasing an order for additional material. While the solution may have been utilizing both the Power Apps and Power BI platforms, the user simply experiences a complete end to end solution in one window on their desktop.

In the example below, we are analyzing the Sale Price and Profit by Country and Segment. Notice once you have embedded your Power App in a Power BI Dashboard you can navigate between screens.

In this next screenshot, still working with the same data as the previous example, you can utilize the native Power Apps features like Search with Power BI data.

In this last screenshot, for this example, you will see the embedded Power App is filtered by the Power BI selection.

Translating needs to the appropriate technology

To build the best solution, think through the use cases and determine how you want to collect the data, use the data, and analyze the data. Once you have determined how the solution will be used in each one of those cases, you can begin to select the right technology to execute each function.

It would be difficult to cover every use case and decision point, but to help you understand the decision-making process let’s explore sending an email via Power Automate versus sending an email via Power Apps. First consider the look and feel of the email, does your solution require special formatting of the email? To format the text of your email in Power Apps, like adding italics or bold text, you would need to write HTML. In Power Automate though, this functionality can be implemented by using the simple Design Interface that is provided out of the box.

Below are examples of the formulas to execute sending an email via Power Apps versus via Power Automate.

Send an Email via Power Apps

Send an Email via Power Automate

Also, the number of steps in your solution/process will aid you in determining which technology best suits your needs. Power Apps is great for performing simple solutions with minimal steps but as your solutions become more complex and requires multiple steps, Power Automate would be the better solution.

Again for this particular example, both technologies can provide the same solution, but there are little nuances that should be considered and thoroughly discussed during the design process to determine your requirements and help you choose the best product for your solution.

Let's not forget about discussing Power Apps and Power BI, and when to use one vs. the other. When deciding whether to use the basic charts, graphs, and visuals that come with Power Apps out of the box or to utilize a more powerful software like Power BI it really depends on your business solution and requirements. For example, if in your solution, you are wanting to add some basic graphs and charts to improve the apps overall look and feel while adding some visual flair for your users, Power Apps has you covered.

Here is a quick look at one of the simple, out of the box Power Apps charts.

Simple and minimal design above, nothing crazy but it gets the job done.

On the other hand, if your solution requires in-depth analysis of your data, and robust visuals, Power BI will be the best product for your solution. Keep in mind, with Power BI, each app user will need an additional license on top of the Power Apps license. This is a small price to pay though if our solution relies on intuitive dashboards, charts, graphs, and several other features to help you get the most out of your solution.

By identifying the needs of related Power Apps technologies in your solution and strategically implementing them, you will be able to provide your users with a better overall experience when using the solution.

Reference Links:

Ways build power apps

Designing Power Apps app

Top 10 best use cases for power automate

Are you tired of wasting your time with manual processes? Want a flexible workflow platform to automate communications and document management at your firm?

At the most basic level, the workflow platform has to be user-friendly and light to load in order for the stakeholders to use it on a daily basis. The platform should send out alerts and notifications to all the users, have easy log-in processes, integrate and work harmoniously with other softwares, manage and track documents, and provide analytics on the content that’s stored in it.

SharePoint Designs prides in taking up one-off novel projects that have challenging pain points and require a completely innovative business solution through Microsoft Office 365, especially SharePoint and Azure.

Problem

Conveyance firms act as a liaison between law firms and customers that want to buy properties. Conveyancing, for decades, has been a service that involves a colossal amount of manual labour. This legal process of buying and selling properties involves document, contract, and physical property verifications. The most important of all is managing the back and forth communication between customers, sellers, bankers, middlemen, legal advisors, and other third-party vendors.  

One such conveyancing firm wanted a solution to leverage technology, and automate most of this tasks for all the stakeholders involved. This way, customers could engage in remote transactions instead of having to meet everyone in person. The technological solution could save time, efforts, and energy for all the individuals involved.  

Solution

SharePoint Design’s team came up with a SaaS solution for the client where we designed a personalised cloud-based workflow platform using Microsoft Office 365. We were able to deliver the project to the client within one and a half months!

As opposed to Google’s SaaS and PaaS solutions, Microsoft’s solutions are more integrated. Therefore, using Office 365, we could build a workflow that allowed staff to create their log-in identities, authenticated them, stored all the company documents, gave a server space to host the workflow platform, and automated the organization of work emails in different folders on Outlook as well. We also built an Outlook plugin, a pop-up reminder for employees, asking them to organize emails into various folders if they were not already sorted automatically.

Technology

The team at SharePoint Designs used Angular 6.0, Graph API and Outlook API to come up with a fresh solution for the client.

You can build mobile and web applications with Angular. Add to that Microsoft’s Graph API, you have good productivity apps and workflow platforms. With Graph API, you can integrate these platforms seamlessly with other Microsoft products like Excel or Outlook, create calendars, retrieve and analyze data, organize documents, analyze user patterns and send out alerts, and do business forecasts in real time. Combined with the Outlook API, you could link your workflow platform to Outlook to send and receive emails. Whatever messages you send through your workflow platform automatically gets organized in various folders on Outlook as well.

Finally,

If you are looking to automate and scale up your business, we at SharePoint Designs provide PaaS and SaaS solutions. Leave it to a good integrated-technology platform that can do the job for you. Using SharePoint, businesses can achieve advanced technological feats.

Want efficiency, productivity, and smooth collaborations? Office 365 is the best integrated solution provided by Microsoft for all your business needs. Microsoft’s products have a competitive advantage over Google and  IBM products as they can be integrated with one another seamlessly to build customized business solutions.

Your current document management system (DMS) is not up to your expectations: there is still a lot of manual work involved to organize, search or retrieve files. Your important files are getting overwritten, and you are unable to keep the version history intact. Interdepartmental collaborations are a total mess. Your staff’s productivity takes a hit because they are busy sorting and organizing files most of the time. The server keeps failing and the current DMS is wasting your time and the company’s money.

Do not lose hope yet...

At SharePoint Designs we would like to share a case study on how we helped an accounting firm with a DMS that combines Microsoft's SharePoint technology with artificial intelligence (AI).

Problem

The account firm wanted several years worth of hard copy documents digitized, organized and placed in various folders. They files needed to be named appropriately with the corresponding dates of creation, organization name etc., for easy search and retrieval.

This was usually a manual task where in the staff, after scanning the documents, creates appropriate folders and subfolders to organize them. Then, the individual renames each of the files based on its type, the client it belongs to, date of creation, and version history. The documents could belong to a miscellaneous collection of financial, legal, letter, collateral, or other types. This strenuous process is not feasible or efficient for large firms that need hard copies digitized for various procedures.

Solution

SharePoint Design’s team arrived at a simple solution to automate this manual task by leveraging technology to create an AI metadata recognition system. For instance, the AI software reads the scanned documents line by line. It recognizes the unique elements in the document as instructed by a software code like date, organization’s name, logo, type of document, etc.

Accordingly, it creates tags based on keywords like date, document type, and organizational name to create folders and subfolders to rename the files and save them correspondingly. If there are different versions of the same file, the software retains the version history as well.

For instance, at the most basic level, this customized solution can do the following for you. Let’s assume that there are there are various edited versions of an invoice billed to an ABC Company. The AI software would create a folder for the company and subfolders for the year and month. Under these folders, there may be a subfolder named “invoices”. In this folder, the software may save the corresponding invoices by giving names such as “ABC. 3.9.2019. Invoice-1”, “ABC. 3.9.2019. Invoice-2,” etc.

More commonly, the accounting staff at various firms are usually indecisive about how to structure various documents, especially if the clientele is massive. In fact,  the templates and formats of various documents would have changed over the years as well. Leave it to AI to do such immensely complicated tasks with ease. Years of machine learning and robust research with software codes has equipped the AI software to recognize documents even if they have extremely modified templates.

Technology

Our firm has combined SharePoint DMS platform with Azure Search API and Azure Cognitive Services to bring about a tailored solution for our client’s problem.

The SharePoint platform has multiple products that can be integrated with one another to get hybrid solutions for your most complex business problems. You can store and access files in a well-organized fashion.It works on multiple devices, let’s you collaborate with multiple users who can have a single log-in to access all apps.

With seamless workflows, user permissions and zero server problems, you can maintain document security, confidentiality and compliances. You could also do data analysis and reporting on all the content you have stored on SharePoint. It is extendable and its scope is expandable for you to build customized solutions for your unique business needs.

Azure is a cloud-solutions service that hosts all your data, applications, softwares, tools with a cloud or hybrid server. No need to set up expensive hardware anymore. All you have to do is just pay a monthly subscription to manage everything through Azure. Azure’s cognitive services help build intelligent applications with features like facial and speech recognition, visual detection, intuitive search solutions, etc. With the help of Azure AI, all your data can be read and analyzed without hassles to bring out the correct business outcomes for you.

So, free yourself from manual labor and become a decision-making authority to give your company that outstanding competitive edge in the market.

Microsoft flow is a cloud-based workflow engine, Using Flow end users can create cross application workflows (no code workflows).  Flow is a part of office 365 E3 suite. It is a successor of SharePoint designer workflows. Complex level Flows can be promoted to an Azure logic app.

Microsoft Flows Vs SharePoint Designer Workflows

Anatomy of Microsoft Flow

• Flow Designer
• Connectors, Triggers & Actions
• Variables & Data Flow
• Expressions
• Branching, Error Handling & Scopes

Flow Designer – Create a Flow from Browser or Mobile Application

Desktop Version

• Go to https://flow.Microsoft.com
• Sign-in with Office 365 Account
• Start from existing template or import from disk or create from scratch (both in desktop & mobile browsers)

Mobile Version

• Install flow mobile app, sign in
• Create new flow (template or from scratch).

Connectors

Connectors Wrapper around an API that allows Flow to talk with other services.It exposes Triggers & Actions.

Standard Connectors – included as part of E3

• Microsoft Connectors (SharePoint, Azure Blob storage, SQL Server.)
• Non-Microsoft Connectors (Twitter, Slack.)
• https://us.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/?filter=&category=standard

Premium Connectors – additional cost

• Microsoft Connectors (HTTP with Azure AD.)
• Other Connectors (Salesforce, MySQL.)
• https://us.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/?filter=&category=premium

Custom Connectors – additional cost , development

• ISV, System Integrators, End users can create custom connectors to integrate any system/application/service.
• https://us.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/?filter=&category=custom

Triggers

Run based on user action or event

• From other apps in office 365 – PowerApps, SharePoint, etc.
• From SQL
• From dedicated Flow button

Run on a schedule

• Flow also run based on time schedule, From every minute to 1 am on Days.

Run by HTTP GET/POST to URL generated by flow

• Call another Flow
• Call from any application/service/agent that can make HTTP calls

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Scenarios & Types of Triggers

Triggers - Scenarios

• Simple: Flows start with a Trigger.
• Advanced: Flows can have more than 1 trigger (async actions)
• Custom: Flows can have custom triggers

Types

Polling Trigger

• Periodically checks the service
• Checks count as executions

Push Triggers

• Listen for data on an endpoint or wait for event.

Actions

• Execute CRUD operations with workflow context
• SharePoint: Create Item, Delete Item, Create File.
• SQL: Insert Row, Update Row, Delete Row, Get Row.

• Transform Data
• Inline – using expressions (e.g. string operations, math operations.)
• Other services – Html to text.

Send Notification

• Send mobile notification, send email notification etc.

Call other Flow

• Chain Flows to create complex Flows.

Variables

• Use Variables connector*
• Initialize & then set value
• Supported value types (Boolean, String, Object, Array, Float).

Variables are NOT always necessary!

Why variables are not always necessary?

• Data Flows from each step and is available for all later steps
• ‘Add Dynamic Content’ allows us to select outputs from previous steps
• Certain outputs show up based on the types of the inputs and outputs.

Expressions

• Expressions can be used in most of the fields to transform data inline
• IntelliSense available as you type

Branching

• If-then-else

• Switch

For-Each

• By default, parallel
• Parallel (20 exec)
• Supports sequential

Do-Until

• Emulate State machines
• Help in approvals & more

• Parallel branches

Error Handling

• Actions can be set to run if previous action fails/times out.

Scopes

• Logically group actions
• Allow advanced error handling for a group of actions
• Scope boxes are in brown boxes.

Flow Template Overview

Flow templates are prepacked reusable flows for various business scenarios. Here is the link to  View default templates already available  in Microsoft Flow.

• From existing template in the public template gallery
• Search against the public template gallery
• Access this gallery from Modern SharePoint List/Library
• Filter & Embed the gallery in any page or application
• From existing template in a private template gallery
• Not available. Idea available in user voice.
• Discover flow templates

Discover Flow Templates from Template Gallery

There was one of many built in templates to build your flow from scratch for example Sending email to manager, send remainders to myself, Get weather of the current location, and lot more…

Navigate to templates and take a look at it choose your template customize it Save and run your flow with no code.

Templates – Discover from Modern User Interface (SharePoint)

In SharePoint user are able to create a flow from the modern UI with the help of flow button it suggest the default templates already available in the template gallery.

Templates – Discover (From Classic Page)

• Filter & embed the gallery in any application (not just in SharePoint or Office 365)
• Send the context of the current component (e.g. list name, library etc.) to the gallery

Microsoft Provides the SDK  and use embedded IFrame source to integrate the Flow button in SharePoint list classic view. It works same as modern User Interface like able to pick the flow templates from classic window.

Templates – Create and Monitor the Flows

Create a flow that performs one or more tasks automatically after it's triggered by an event. We can create a Flow without using the default templates.

Below we created the simple approval flow template from the blank template. It triggers the flow when the SharePoint list item has been created then send email to the approve and capture the approval status send it to the initiator who create the item.

Templates – Publish

A flow which has run successfully can be published to public template gallery

• Sends the flow for review with Microsoft
• Takes days to weeks.
• Only generic use cases are usually accepted

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