One of the outstanding issues with the new Power Automate Designer is Copy and Paste for Scope steps and other steps that can contain multiple actions.
Copy and Paste in the new designer
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Even though Copy and Paste has been around in the classic editor forever as a preview feature. It does hep a lot to speed up development of flows.
When we look around in the new designer there is no option to copy the Scope action.
So ideally we would want to copy the scope action and all the steps inside. Even though there is no direct option available to do this, we can use Copilot to do this for us.
All we need to do is use the following prompt:
Copy the scope step
And now we have a flow with a copy of the Scope step with all its steps included. This is a great way to use Copilot to do something that isn’t fully there in the new UI yet.
Copy/Paste Expectations
I often get asked about what you can copy within a flow. I would compare copying parts of a flow with copying code. Power Automate attempts to rename and fix things for you. This is almost expected. Is there any programmer who would expect that when they copy their code that the programming tools would fix the code for them?
I wouldn’t expect so.
So why do we expect the low code tools to fix everything for us?
One of the limitations of Copy/Paste in Power Automate has always been that you can’t copy actions from one switch branch to another. Why not? I would be happy for the action to be copied even if that leaves my flow broken. Fix it and then, test it. But the problem of course is that it would risk a flow becoming unusable. This is you should always have a development environment where you are happy to break flows. Then once all is working deploy the solution to Test/UAT and Production.
Copy/Paste is very unreliable when there are expressions being used. They are often lost in the process. Also, condition actions do not report an issue after copy when they include expressions so your flow appears to run but does not. Finally, renaming is nearly impossible without having to find expression issues . So there are a lot of platform issues that Microsoft needs to correct before copy/paste is painless to use.