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The 5 worst things about Power Automate Part two 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 1 - The clunky user interface (this blog) 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 two 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
1 - The clunky user interface (this blog)
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

1 - The clunky user interface

I realise Power Automate is a website (so it's never going to work like an iPad) but does it really have to be this clunky? For example, if I've got lots of flows I want to delete, can't I just tick them and click on a single button?

Why can't I select more than one flow at a time, and then click on a dustbin icon somewhere? Do I really have to delete the flows one at a time?

More annoying, though, is the way so little fits on the screen horizontally:

This flow has a parallel branch, and within one branch a simple condition. This is a fairly simple and common scenario, but I'm already having to zoom out or scroll across to read everything.

And so often making simple changes proves more difficult that it should. For example, if you want to move the bottom two actions below into the top scope, this seems to be virtually impossible:

You can't move either action on its own because they depend on each other, and you can't select more than one action at the same time to move them together!

What's particularly frustrating is that Power Automate Desktop (which also runs online) manages to solve most of these problems, and has so much better a user interface.

Parts of this blog
The 5 worst things about Power Automate 1 - The clunky user interface (this blog) 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