Power Automate for desktop console

The flow console is the central interface of Power Automate.

After signing in, your username will be displayed in the top-right corner, while a list of flows occupies the central pane. At the top right-hand side, a dropdown list allows you to switch environments in order to access different flows; alongside the environments are also the Settings and Help buttons, and a search bar for easily locating flows.

Starting a desktop flow

Power Automate users can run any available desktop flow through the console. To run a desktop flow as local attended, hover the cursor over it and select the Start button. You can find the current status of each flow in the Status column of the desktop flows list.

If the flow contains input variables, a dialog box prompts the user to provide values for each input variable.

Editing a desktop flow

Through the console, users can create a new flow by pressing the New flow button, or edit an already existing one by double-clicking on it, or hovering the cursor over it and pressing the edit button:

In both scenarios, the flow designer will be launched; it's the component where flow creation and editing take place.

Note

When more than one people make changes to a shared desktop flow, the last one that saves the flow overrides all previous actions.

Console Settings

Press the Settings button to configure Power Automate for desktop to your liking:

Under the Application category, select whether Power Automate should launch automatically, and whether closing the console will close the application as well. You may also set a hotkey combination to instantly stop a running flow.

Using the Monitoring/Notifications drop-down menu, you can choose whether Power Automate will display integrated Windows notifications, a custom monitoring window, or no notifications at all. To find more information regarding Power Automate notifications, refer to Runtime notifications.

By default, Power Automate always prompts you to confirm the triggering of a desktop flow via URL. The Display confirmation dialog when invoking flows via URL option allows you to disable this functionality. You can find more information about external links in Run desktop flows via URL.

To decide whether Microsoft may collect diagnostic data to improve user experience, navigate to the Data collection settings tab.

Note

Only an admin may change Data collection settings.

Desktop flow details

To review the details of a desktop flow, right-click on it and select Details. Through the Details dialog, you can edit the name and description of the flow, as well as see the owner, the creation and last modification dates, and the flow ID.

Additionally, there is a Run URL that you can use to run the flow through many different sources, such as browsers, the Windows Run application, and the Command Prompt. You can find more information regarding this functionality in Run desktop flows via URL.

Update Power Automate for desktop

Power Automate will frequently check for updates and display a notification dialog. In order not to disrupt your work, the update dialog offers you the option to delay the update and proceed with it at a later time. If you don't wish to receive any update notifications, you may uncheck the Show update notifications option in the general settings. To manually update, you may select the Check for updates button in the general settings.

Switch organization

For cases that a user is member of more than one tenant, they can switch between them by selecting their alias at the top right of the console window and clicking on Switch organization.