Phase 5 · Power Automate · Level 1 · Foundations
Power Automate: Foundations Quiz · 10 min
Why it matters A quick check of your judgement before you move on. There's no penalty for a low score, and you can retake it, or take it first to test out of a level you already know.
These aren't trivia questions; they're the judgement calls you'll actually face when you start automating. Pick the best option for each scenario, and you'll see an explanation after each one.
Passing this checkpoint: work through the level first, then score 70% or more here.
Skipping this level: already confident? Take this cold and score 80% or more to test out and jump ahead. Below that, nothing is lost, you just study the level as normal.
1. You do a two-minute filing task once every couple of months and you're tempted to automate it. Using the frequency × time × error-proneness test, what's the sensible call? Automate it: any repetitive task should be automated. Leave it as a manual job: it's rare and quick, so the setup and upkeep won't pay off. Automate it along with three other rare tasks to make the effort worthwhile. Automate it, because building flows is good practice regardless of the task. 2. Which of these correctly describes a trigger and an action in a flow? The trigger is what the flow does; the action is the app it connects to. The trigger is the event that starts the flow ('when a new email arrives'); the action is what it then does ('save the attachment'). The trigger and the action are two words for the same thing. The trigger is the paid plan; the action is the free plan. 3. In Power Automate, what is a connector? The paid licence that lets a flow run. The bridge between Power Automate and a particular app (like Outlook or OneDrive) that supplies that app's triggers and actions. The button you press to start a flow manually. A backup copy of your flow kept in the cloud. 4. You've built a flow that saves email attachments to a OneDrive folder. Before relying on it, what should you do? Nothing: if it looks right in the builder, it will work. Turn it on and rely on noticing if something goes wrong. Send yourself an email with an attachment, then open the folder and confirm the file actually arrived. Delete it and rebuild it a second time to be safe. 5. A flow that reliably filed your attachments for months has suddenly stopped, and you didn't notice for weeks. You recently changed your Microsoft password. What most likely happened, and what does it teach you? Power Automate deleted the flow; you must rebuild it and there's no way to prevent this. The connection to Outlook probably expired after the password change; sign in to the connection again, and turn on failure notifications so next time you're told at once. The internet was down; nothing to be done, it'll fix itself. The flow silently needs a paid upgrade now; buy a licence. 6. You describe a flow to Copilot in plain English and it produces a finished-looking flow in seconds. What's the right next move? Switch it on immediately: the AI built it, so it must be correct. Read every step to check the trigger, actions and details are right, then test it before relying on it. Assume it's wrong and rebuild the whole thing by hand. Add several more steps to make it more impressive before testing. 7. You want a flow to run only when an email arrives from a specific sender AND has an attachment. Why bother adding those conditions to the trigger? It makes the flow look more professional but changes nothing. It keeps the flow focused so it doesn't fire on every email, avoiding a cluttered folder, wasted runs and unexpected behaviour. It's required or the flow won't save. It makes the flow run faster on your own computer. 8. You've got one simple flow working and feel confident, so you're tempted to build a single fifteen-step flow with lots of clever conditions. What's the wiser approach? Build the big flow all at once: you clearly understand automation now. Start small and grow in tested stages: get a simple flow working and trusted, then add steps one at a time, testing after each. Never build anything with more than one step, ever. Copy someone else's complex flow without understanding it, to save time. 9. Dan builds a flow to save expense receipts automatically and stops checking his inbox, trusting the flow completely. Which sentence best captures the risk? There's no risk: that's the whole point of automation. Automation removes the doing, not the responsibility: the flow does exactly what it was built to do at speed, with no instinct for when that's wrong, so its output still needs checking. The risk is only that flows are slow, so Dan should check faster. The risk is that automation is always less accurate than doing it by hand. Answered 0 of 9.
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