Exporting and importing flows in Power Automate

This page has 0 threads | Add post

Blogs

Finding our blogs useful? Please consider helping us to share more!

Exporting and importing flows in Power Automate
How to export a flow from one account and import it into another in Power Automate

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 November 2023

In this blog

Exporting a flow
Importing a flow
Turning on your imported flow

In a recent blog I showed how you can write a flow to delete all of the flows in a user's list. What I now want to do is to run this on different delegates' accounts, and to do that I'm going to have to export it from one account and import it to another - which is the subject of this blog.

Note that there doesn't seem to be any way to export a set of flows in one go (another of those baffling holes in basic Power Automate functionality) - or at least, this Power Automate Community thread and this community ideas thread both suggest this can't be done (I believe you can do this with a PowerShell script, but that's cheating).

Exporting a flow

Start off by choosing to export your flow from one account:

Click on the 3 dots next to any flow name, and choose the option shown to export it to a zipped file.

You can now type in some details about the package that you're creating:

As the above shows, it doesn't really matter what you type in for these fields.

You now need to cofigure your import set-up:

Click on each of the two links on the right and choose to change them, if required.

For the import set-up, I've changed the setting from Update to Create as new:

I'm envisaging that this flow will be new for each account into which it's imported.

For the related resources, I don't seem to have much choice:

An easy choice to make - because there isn't one.

When I've finished configuring this export, I can run it!

Click on this button at the bottom right of the form to run the export.

Although a Downlaod button appears, on my laptop at any rate the download happened automatically:

I can now try importing this into another user's environment.

Importing a flow

I now want to delete all these flows left behind by another delegate on a course:

It takes 3 mouse clicks then about 5 seconds of waiting to delete each flow: deleting multiple flows is tiring, stressful and mind-numbingly boring.

So the first thing to do is import the package I just exported, containing my flow which will automate the process of deleting flows:

Choose this option to import the package you've just exported.

Click on the Upload button and then select the zipped file you've just created:

This button is at the top right of the screen.

What you now have to do is to get the Import button which appears at the bottom of the form to light up!

At the moment, the Import button is greyed out.

The problem is that this flow is trying to use a connection which doesn't exist:

Click to select this resource.

The connection doesn't exist, so choose to create it:

Click on this + symbol to add this connection.

If you can see a connection to Power Automate Management, select it, but otherwise create a new connection:

Click to add a new connection.

Use the search box to help you find the Power Automate Management connection:

When you can see the right connection, select it!

Choose your authentication type:

I've only got one choice - to use the authentication of the account I'm logged on to.

You can then pick an account:

Pick which account you want to use to connect to Power Automate Management (presumably the one you're currently logged on to).

You now need to remember to refresh the list of flows:

Refresh the list and you should see the connection listed; you can then select this and save this.

You should now be able to import your package!

Click on the Import button, now you can!

Power Automate will now show you it's importing your flow:

This message appears - do what it says (ie nothing).

Turning on your imported flow

You'll now need to do one final thing, which is to turn on the flow you've imported:

Choose to turn on the flow you've just imported.

You can now run your flow!

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

This blog has 0 threads

Add a new post

BLOGS BY TOPIC

BLOGS BY AUTHOR

Exporting a flow

Importing a flow

Turning on your imported flow

Head office

London

Manchester