# What is Power Automate?

Whenever you find yourself executing a repetitive task, you can **use your computer to do the work for you using automation**. Power Automate is basically then running on your computer which **triggers a flow to complete actions within the business process**.

## What Power Automate is used for

Typically you'll find that you can use Power Automate for:

* Automating a **set of repetitive tasks**
  * like moving a file to somewhere else
  * renaming a bunch of folders\

* **Guiding users** through a set of steps
  * **business process flow in Power Automate**
  * where the order of the steps is important\

* **Connecting to external data** sources or through an API
  * automating the data connection points\

* Automate **desktop process**
  * can have **robotic process automation (RPA)** capability

## Purchase order approval example

Approvals are a common automated process using Power Automate. Whenever approvals need to be mandated, a person higher up in the business typically needs to read through things and check certain things off manually in order to get something approved. They'll need to do this for every single approval request that comes through.

However, using Power Automate we can use flows to do a lot of this work for us.&#x20;
