In the free version of Power Automate Desktop (PAD) there is one big limitation: You cannot share any Flows you have created locally on your PC with your friends, colleagues or the world. However, there is an easy workaround for this.

Just open the flow you have created, and you want to share for editing inside PAD. Click inside the central window and press CTRL+A on your keyboard. All items will become selected. Press CTRL+C to copy them to the clipboard.

Now open Notepad and press CTRL+V to paste your flow into the text editor.

PAD is based on a script language called Robin and what you see here is script you created without know the Robin scripting language just by creating your flow in PAD with Drag and Drop.

Now save the text file under the name of your flow. Now you can easily send it to your friend e.g. as an email attachment.

All your friend has to do to import the script into his PAD is to open it in Notepad, press CTRL+A and CTRL+C to copy it. Afterwards he needs to select “New flow” inside PAD, name it properly and press CTRL+V to paste the Robin script into his PAD and it will show up as the same building blocks like in the initial screenshot on your machine.

Note: If your flow is advanced and consists of several sub-flows (shown as different tabs inside the UI) you have to do this process for the main flow and each sub-flow. You can still paste everything into one text file, but you should add the information that the next code part is a sub-flow and what is the name of the sub-flow so it can be re-created easily.

What is Power Automate Desktop?

Power Automate Desktop (PAD) is a tool that allows you to automate all kind of repetitive tasks on your local PC. It is a low-code solution, so there is no need for you to learn a programming language and it is free of charge for Windows 10 and 11 users. PAD is deeply integrated with other Microsoft products like Excel, Outlook, OneDrive, Azure Cloud and has a lot of features for to process data from XML, Jason files, SQL databases and many more with only a little knowledge required about the inner workings of those technologies. Power Automate Desktop is a so-called RPA tool. RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. There is an online version of Power Automate, too, available under https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/ Instead of automating processes on your local PC it is focused on automating web services and cloud data processing.