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The 5 worst things about Power Automate Part one of a six-part series of blogs
To try to show what developing Power Automate flows is like, we've created two blogs: one listing out its 5 best features, and one listing its 5 worst ones. This is the pessimistic one! The 5 worst things about Power Automate (this blog) 1 - The clunky user interface 2 - Those expressions! 3- How much do you want to learn JSON? 4 - Everything takes longer than you might expect to learn 5 - You can not disable actions

The 5 worst things about Power Automate

Part one of a six-part series of blogs

To try to show what developing Power Automate flows is like, we've created two blogs: one listing out its 5 best features, and one listing its 5 worst ones. This is the pessimistic one!

The 5 worst things about Power Automate (this blog)
1 - The clunky user interface
2 - Those expressions!
3- How much do you want to learn JSON?
4 - Everything takes longer than you might expect to learn
5 - You can not disable actions

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 October 2022

The 5 worst things about Power Automate

One of the best ways to understand software is to understand its strengths and weaknesses (this is probably true of anything or anyone in life too). In this spirit, I offer here my personal take of the 5 most annoying features in Power Automate.

If you're a glass-half-full sort of person, you may prefer to read my companion blog listing the 5 best features of Power Automate instead! Or you could combine the two to get a more balanced verdict ...

My 5 Power Automate pet hates are:

Number	Feature	Notes
1	Clunky user interface	It's too hard to see all of your actions, or move them round the screen.
2	Expressions	Not only is the Power Automate expression syntax unnecessarily complicated, but the editor doesn't take any prisoners either.
3	JSON	I resent having to analyse the structure of JSON text strings to get at the information I want!
4	Lack of ease of use	It can be unintuitive working out how to accomplish things in Power Automate flows.
5	You can't disable actions	It's only a small thing, but it continually annoys me: why can't you temporarily disable actions in a flow, with a view to reinstating them later?

Just to reiterate: I have the utmost respect for Microsoft. It's not easy (in fact I think it's extremely difficult) to make software powerful but at the same time easy to use, and I think on balance Microsoft do a very good job.

But ...

Parts of this blog
The 5 worst things about Power Automate (this blog) 1 - The clunky user interface 2 - Those expressions! 3- How much do you want to learn JSON? 4 - Everything takes longer than you might expect to learn 5 - You can not disable actions