3 reasons to use the new designer in Power Automate

Hardly ever, I’ve seen a software change take so long for people to accept. How long will it be before developers just get on with as the new designer in Power Automate? Some people end up using it, but the majority of the experienced flow developers still use the old designer most of the time.

New Designer Reason 1 – Version history

This feature has been hidden away in between the other options, but Version history is just a great way to recover from that Oops moment.

You can then click on each of the versions of the flow and review the changes made within each version, before potentially restoring that version.

The flow designer will show you exactly which steps you had in each version.

Even if your changes didn’t add any steps, you can click on the steps to review the settings for each step.

And the best part of this solution is that it even collects the versions of your flow that were created with the old designer.

New Designer Reason 2 – Find an action in your flow

How often are you looking for that one action in your flow with many branches?

Searching for actions is one of my favourite reasons to use the new designer. Especially in flows with many conditions, switches and scopes. All these containers can leave actions hidden. But with the search it is easy to find that one important step that you want to update.

New Designer Reason 3 – Pinning of actions

Now this is a bit of an often questioned feature. You can pin one action and then open the settings of another action and compare the settings.

Also, don’t forget the code view. In my example, I can fairly quickly see what is configured differently when I compare that work and failing step in my flow.

In the past you would update two actions that are located near each other by opening both actions. As shown below when you have a create item and an update item this is easily done. However, when the actions are not near each other this would be a real pain.

What makes you use the new designer? What needs to be added, changed or fixed in the new designer for you to use this? Or do you find yourself just use it without realising that you’ve been working with the new designer?

Agent flows

Even though Agent flows use a slightly different UI (How many new UIs can we have?), the above mentioned features all work within Agent flows as well.