It’s second nature to all of us to select something, copy it, then paste it somewhere else right? However, there are some hidden gems tucked away inside Power Automate that might just make your life easier.
In this article I’m going to cover the most common way you will want to be aware of as a Power Automate beginner and also share a discovery that can save huge amounts of time across flows.
Action Clipboard
Power Automate is actually very clever! Out of the box, we can select the ellipsis next to any action throughout our flow, then select Copy to Clipboard. Two steps have occurred at this point. Power Automate is aware that an action has now been copied to the clipboard and will store that in memory for any Power Automate tab that is open, meaning we can paste these actions in our existing flow or inside a flow open in another tab.
To paste your action, select the + icon or select new step to add a new action. Then select the My Clipboard tab. You should now see your copied action waiting there ready to be used.
Raw Action JSON
When you copy an action, it will also store a JSON version of that action as text. This can be copied into any text editor to see what’s going on.
Why do you need to know this?
A common example maybe, you want to save your actions to be used later and maybe need somewhere to store useful actions such as a word document.
A more common example could be you are reading a forum, and someone suggests you use an action. Instead of trying to build the action from a blurry screenshot or trying to understand someone’s reply, you could ask them to share the Raw JSON for an action and paste it directly into your flow.
To paste your action, select the + icon or select new step to add a new action. Then select the My Clipboard tab. If nothing has been copied, you’ll see the message “Save time and paste your most-used Flow code snippets here.“. You can paste your copied JSON here by pressing CTRL + V, then select the action that appears.
Considerations
Its important to remember that you may run into complications to consider when copying actions across flows. Data and dynamic content are often linked to previous steps within a flow or third party connector that has been connecting to the flow the action originally came from. These will also have to be setup for pasting actions to work correctly.