Let’s look at modifying your flow. You've now built your own flow and you find that something could be added, or something could be taken away, or maybe you just want to make things run a little smoother. In order to add extra actions to a flow you always look for the place that says “add an action”. That can be found between actions and within an action. 

When we click on add an action, and put in SharePoint, notice that there are actions and triggers. Things like controls only have actions and do not have triggers. You might find yourself adding a lot to your flow if you started with a template. Sometimes 3/4 of the template works just great but you need to change 1/4 of it. So, lengthening it with more steps can be part of that change.

Another way we can modify our flow is by changing actions that already exist. There are a lot of things that can be changed on an action and, depending on the action itself, there are multiple advanced options or different settings for that action. Many times, when we are using connections to SharePoint, there is one important piece in the advanced options that really helps out.

When we turn on advanced options, you'll notice a new field comes into play called “limit columns by view”. Some of our SharePoint lists are very long and to be able to grab all the data from a SharePoint list is either cumbersome or it just fails. This advanced option helps us to gather just what we need by using a view that you've already created in your list to bring in only the things you want to change. For instance, if I'm only changing the status value, the manufacturer, and model, then I would create a view that only includes those things. That will make your flow much faster and more efficient. Other fields may come in because they are required but it does cut down a lot of our data management. 

Another good way to change your actions is to rename them. In this course we mostly looked at flows that were not very long. I have some flows that have over 100 different actions in them. If I don't rename each action to mean something to me, I can easily lose my place in what things are doing and why they are where they are. By clicking on the ellipse menu, we can choose to rename the action.

One other item that we can use to change, or update our flows is very helpful and you may have seen me do it earlier. When you click on the ellipse menu for an action you can choose to “copy to my clipboard”. That allows you to bring this back into another action or another step with all the information already pre-configured for you. That only stays in your clipboard while active in this session. You can copy an action from one flow to another, but it has to be done in the same online session.

By now you should be noticing the flexibility in our power automate environment. Changes can be made at any point in our flow. Then by testing we can find other areas that might need more efficiency or corrections as we go forward. 

Next up, the conclusion to our course.