Azure Power Automate

5 min readJan 21, 2023

What is Azure Power Automate?

Power Automate provides a single low-code platform that combines robotic process automation (RPA) and digital process automation (DPA) to help you streamline repetitive tasks and processes. Automate applications without APIs. Build and scale business processes with virtual machines in Azure.

What is Microsoft Power Automate used for?

Power Automate is a service that helps you create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data, and more.

What language does Power Automate use?

Power Automate for desktop enables you to automate complex scenarios using scripts in VBScript, JavaScript, PowerShell, and Python.

What can I automate in Azure?

Azure Automation delivers a cloud-based automation, operating system updates, and configuration service that supports consistent management across your Azure and non-Azure environments. It includes process automation, configuration management, update management, shared capabilities, and heterogeneous features.

What are the types of Power Automate?

Five different types of Microsoft Power Automate Flows

Schedule Flow. Schedule Flow is exactly what it sounds like. …
Automated Flow. There are a lot of automated flow triggers, but every one of them starts with “when”. …
Instant Flow. …
UI Flow. …
Business Process Flow.

Is Power Automate a workflow?

Microsoft Power Automate is a no-code/low-code drag-and-drop solution that allows users to create workflows to automate repetitive tasks and business processes. The app is available on desktop, mobile, and Microsoft Teams, and as a browser app.

Demo-Building AI model

Building AI model

Step 1: Select AI Builder, select custom to extract data from standardized documents, and click get started.

You need to have an AI Builder license for this step

Step 2: You’ll be redirected to a list of action items. Select all the options that are relevant to you. In our case, we assume that the invoices are fairly standardized, hence we will select the first option

Step 3: Adding the variables

In the next step, select the information you want to extract from your invoices. In this case, pre-planning the variables come in handy.

We would like to select fields for invoice numbers, invoice data, and total amount. We can also select the single-page table to select an entire table of all the items mentioned in the invoice.

For the single table, mention the number of columns and rename it appropriately.

Once you’ve listed all the information you want to extract, select Done and choose next.

Step 4: Adding collections

Collections are set of files that have the same format. Upload your invoices from the same vendor in different collections. Once you upload the documents, select the fields and tables to reflect the necessary values.

Open any document that you’ve uploaded. Select detect words to see the fields that are automatically detected. Hover your mouse over the fields that you want to select. Then select the value for each field.

Step 5: Once done, select the Train model. Then choose Go to Your models. The list should show your model with the name you gave at the start.

So now, our AI model is complete. Let’s create a flow where we will use the AI model to extract data from our email attachment and save the information in excel.

Step 6: Go to flows, and select create an automated flow. And choose the trigger that you want. In this case, we will select Recieve email on Gmail and create.

Step 7: You’ll see a flow where only Gmail trigger is added. Select the required option. I’ll add a filter where in it processes emails with invoices in the subject line and has an attachment.

Step 8: Add the next step for processing the invoice using the AI builder. Select +New Step and select AI builder. Select “Extract custom information from documents” and select your AI model from the drop-down. Add the document type and select attachment content for Form.

Step 9: Select New Action and select Excel. Select add new row as you want to extract information from the invoice and add the data into a new row in your Excel document.

Step 10: Input all the locations of your excel, the table, and the column data from the drop-down. Here, you will assign the data extracted from the invoice to the correct columns in your excel.