How to Share a Power Automate Desktop Flow (Free & Premium)

How to Share a Power Automate Desktop Flow (Free and Premium)

There are three ways to share a Power Automate Desktop flow, and the right pick depends on what you actually mean by “share”. The free way is to copy the actions inside the flow with Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C, paste them into a text file, and send the file across. The Premium way is to open the Power Automate portal, find the flow under My flows > Desktop flows, click Share, add the user, and pick User or Co-Owner. The cross-environment way is to put the flow into a solution and export the solution as a ZIP. Three doors. Three different things behind them.

Think of a desktop flow like a recipe written by a chef. You can send the recipe to a friend so they can cook it themselves. You can invite them to cook in your kitchen using your stove. Or you can have a meal delivered to them every morning at seven. All three are “sharing the recipe”, and each one needs a different setup. In 24 years of training in Singapore, I have seen this single confusion sink more Power Automate projects than any technical bug. Pick the wrong door, and you will either over-pay for Premium licences you didn’t need, or promise something you cannot deliver without them.

This guide walks you through all three methods, step by step. Then we will cover the parts most tutorials skip: what works when you do not have Power Automate Premium, how to schedule a shared flow so it runs automatically, and how to trigger one from a cloud flow so it runs on its own without anyone clicking Run.

What “sharing” a Power Automate Desktop flow actually means

Before picking a method, get clear on what you are trying to share. There are three different things people mean when they say “share my desktop flow”, and they each need a different mechanism.

The first is share the recipe. You want a teammate to see the steps your flow follows, so they can build their own copy, learn from it, or run it manually on their own machine. Copy-and-paste covers this case, and it is the only method that does not need a Premium licence.

The second is share run access. The flow lives in your account, and you want a specific colleague (or a small group) to be allowed to run it or edit it without rebuilding it themselves. The Share button in the Power Automate portal covers this case. It needs both you and the other person to be on a Power Automate Premium plan and in the same environment.

The third is share so it runs for them. Nobody clicks Run. The flow fires on a schedule, from a button on a SharePoint list, from an incoming email, or on a machine where nobody is signed in. This is the cloud-flow trigger pattern, and depending on whether the machine is attended (someone signed in) or unattended (nobody signed in), it needs a Premium or a Process licence.

Mixing these up is where most “how do I share this flow?” conversations go wrong. A teammate who only needs the recipe does not need a Premium licence on day one. A manager who wants the flow to run every morning at seven, without anyone touching it, cannot get there with copy and paste, no matter how many subflows you export. Be clear on which one you want before you spend a cent. For the bigger picture of what desktop flows can and cannot do in the first place, our companion guide on how to use Power Automate is worth a quick read first.

Method 1 — Copy and paste actions (the free way, with the catches)

The copy-paste method is the simplest way to share a desktop flow and the only one that does not need a Premium licence. It works because the actions inside a subflow are stored as plain text on the clipboard. Any Power Automate Desktop install can paste them back into a new flow. (If you do not yet have the desktop client installed, see the install guide first.)

Here is the full step-by-step.

1. Open your flow inside the Power Automate for desktop designer. Make sure you are looking at the subflow you actually want to share, not the Main subflow if your steps live elsewhere.
2. Select all the actions with Ctrl+A. Every action in the current subflow highlights.
3. Copy them with Ctrl+C. The clipboard now holds a plain-text representation of every action, with all its parameters, variables, and UI element references.
4. Paste into a text file. Open Notepad, press Ctrl+V, and save the file as something like MyFlow.txt. Send it across by email, Teams, or a shared drive.
5. The recipient pastes it in. They open Power Automate for desktop, create a new flow, click into the empty canvas, and press Ctrl+V. The full sequence of actions appears in their flow with the original structure intact.

Three catches every guide should mention and most do not.

One subflow at a time. The clipboard only holds the contents of the current subflow. If your flow has Main plus three helper subflows, you have to copy and paste each one separately, and the recipient has to recreate the subflow names by hand.

UI elements are bound to the original machine. If your flow clicks a specific button in Excel, or reads a value from a specific browser tab, the recorded UI element carries the screen position and application metadata of your machine. On the recipient’s machine — different resolution, different browser version, different Office version — those references usually need to be re-recorded before the flow runs. Don’t be surprised. Plan for it.

Cloud-side wrapper does not travel. Schedules, cloud-flow triggers, shared connections, run history — none of that is in the action text. The recipient gets the recipe but starts from zero on everything around it.

Method 2 — Share through the Power Automate portal (Premium path)

When both you and the teammate have a Power Automate Premium plan and are in the same environment, the portal Share button is the right tool. It gives the other person live access to your flow, not a copy. If you change the flow, they see the change immediately. Fantastic for team development.

Here is how to share a desktop flow through the portal.

1. Sign in to the Power Automate portal at make.powerautomate.com with the account that owns the flow.
2. Click My flows in the left navigation, then click the Desktop flows tab. You will see every desktop flow you own in the current environment.
3. Find the flow. Click the more-options icon (the three dots) on the right of the row, and pick Share.
4. Add the user. In the Share panel, click Add people, start typing the name or email of the colleague, and pick them from the suggestions. You can also enter a Microsoft Dataverse team name to share with a whole team at once.
5. Pick the permission level.
   • User — the person can run the flow from Power Automate for desktop or from a cloud flow. They cannot edit the steps or change who else has access.
   • Co-owner — full permissions. They can edit, share, delete, and view the run history of the flow.
6. Click Save. Done. The recipient gets the access immediately. The next time they sign in to Power Automate for desktop with the same account, the shared flow appears in their list.

Two things to know before you reach for this method. First, the Share dialog is greyed out if your account is not on a Power Automate Premium plan — the button looks the same, but it does nothing. Second, this method only works within the same environment. To share across environments or tenants, you need Method 3. Microsoft’s own reference is the share/export desktop flow documentation, which is worth a skim for the edge cases.

Method 3 — Export a solution (for cross-environment or cross-tenant moves)

When the recipient sits in a different environment, a different tenant, or a different organisation entirely, the supported path is to package the desktop flow inside a solution and export it as a ZIP file. The recipient brings the ZIP into their tenant, runs the import, and a copy of your desktop flow lands in their Desktop flows list with all the actions intact.

Here is how to do that.

1. Sign in to the Power Automate portal and click Solutions in the left navigation.
2. Create a new solution with + New solution. Give it a name, a publisher, and a version (start with 1.0.0.0). Click Create.
3. Open the new solution and click + Add existing > Automation > Desktop flow. Pick the desktop flow from the list, click Add, and confirm.
4. Export the solution. Back on the Solutions list, click the more-options icon next to your solution and pick Export solution. Choose Managed if the recipient should not modify the contents, or Unmanaged if they should be free to edit. Click Export and wait for the ZIP file to download.
5. Send the ZIP to the recipient by email, Teams, or a shared drive.
6. The recipient imports. They sign in to their own Power Automate portal, go to Solutions, click Import solution, upload the ZIP, and follow the prompts. Once the import finishes, the desktop flow appears in the recipient’s Desktop flows list.

One common failure mode. Solutions that contain a desktop flow with many recorded UI elements or large embedded images can outgrow the export size limit. If the export errors out with a size warning, remove the recorded screenshots from the actions inside the desktop flow, or split the flow into smaller subflows, then re-export.

Sharing without Premium: what actually works and what doesn’t

This is the section most tutorials dodge. The Microsoft Learn page on sharing desktop flows lists the Premium options without saying they are Premium. The community blogs hand-wave around the licence question. Here is the straight answer.

What works without Premium. Copy and paste of actions is the only free sharing path that Microsoft supports, and it does work. You build a desktop flow on your machine, copy the actions into a text file, send the file to a colleague, and they paste those actions into their own free Power Automate for desktop install. They get the recipe. They run it manually from their own laptop.

What does not work without Premium. Everything else on the cloud side. The portal Share dialog needs a Premium plan on both ends. The solution-based export needs Premium because solutions live in Dataverse. Scheduling a desktop flow with the Recurrence trigger needs the cloud-flow side, which needs Premium for the desktop-flow connector. Running a flow unattended needs a Power Automate Process licence on the target machine, on top of Premium for the maker.

The in-between cases. If you and your colleague are both on the standard Microsoft 365 free tier, copy-paste is the only option, and any “share” beyond manual runs needs a paid plan. If your organisation has Premium for some users but not all, the Premium users can build and share with each other, and the standard users can receive the action text by copy-paste — they just cannot run shared flows from the portal.

The honest position to take with a manager or finance team is this. The free path is enough if the goal is “one person builds the recipe and other people copy it onto their own machines and run it manually”. The Premium path is required as soon as the goal becomes “one flow that several people can run, or that runs on a schedule, or that runs without anyone watching it”. Be honest about which goal you actually have. Managers can be quite demanding about ROI, and the wrong licence story will sink the project before it starts. Singapore teams looking at SkillsFuture or company training budgets to upskill on this should also look at SkillsFuture credits as a way to fund a structured Power Automate course before committing to per-user licences.

Scheduling a shared desktop flow to run automatically

Once a desktop flow is shared (by Method 2 or Method 3), the next question is usually: how do I make it run on its own every morning, every Monday, every hour? The answer is that desktop flows do not have their own scheduler. You schedule them by wrapping the desktop flow inside a cloud flow that uses the Recurrence trigger. The same wrapping pattern is what you use when you send emails with Power Automate on a recurring basis.

Here is how.

1. Sign in to the Power Automate portal and click + Create > Scheduled cloud flow.
2. Set the recurrence. Pick a start date and time, set the interval (every 1 day, every 1 hour, every Monday at 9 am), and click Create. The cloud flow opens with the Recurrence trigger already in place.
3. Add a single action: Run a flow built with Power Automate Desktop. Search for “desktop” in the action picker, choose the connector, and sign in if prompted.
4. Pick the desktop flow from the dropdown. Only flows you own or have access to appear in the list.
5. Choose the run mode, Attended or Unattended.
   • Attended runs on a machine where the user is signed in. The user sees the flow execute on screen.
   • Unattended runs on a machine where nobody is signed in. Needs a Power Automate Process licence on that machine.
6. Save and turn it on. From this point, Microsoft fires the Recurrence trigger on the schedule you set. The cloud flow runs, and the desktop flow runs on the target machine.

If a scheduled run fails, the run history appears in two places: under the cloud flow (which records the trigger and the call) and under the desktop flow (which records the actual execution). Check both when you are debugging.

Triggering a desktop flow from a cloud flow (the “share to run” pattern)

Scheduling on a clock is one trigger. The other common pattern is event-driven. The desktop flow runs when a new row is added to a SharePoint list, when an email with a specific subject arrives, when a button is pressed on a Power Apps form. This is the deepest sense of “sharing” a desktop flow — the recipient does not even know they are running it. They press a button on a form, or send an email, and the flow does its thing on the target machine.

The setup is the same as scheduling, except the trigger is different.

1. Create an automated cloud flow (not a scheduled one) from + Create > Automated cloud flow.
2. Pick the trigger that matches your business event: When a new item is created (SharePoint), When a new email arrives (Outlook), PowerApps (V2), When an HTTP request is received — there are dozens.
3. Add the action “Run a flow built with Power Automate Desktop”, exactly as in the scheduling section above.
4. Wire the trigger’s outputs into the desktop flow’s input variables if the desktop flow accepts inputs. This is how the data from the SharePoint row or the email subject reaches the desktop flow.
5. Pick the run mode (Attended or Unattended) and save the cloud flow.

For event-driven, machine-to-machine running where nobody is signed in, Unattended is the right choice, and you will need a Power Automate Process licence on the target machine. This is the typical RPA-at-scale pattern, and the reason RPA licensing is a recurring conversation in finance reviews. The per-machine licence is not small.

For Singapore-based teams adopting this pattern, our Create Agentic AI Automations Without Coding course is the natural next step after a solid Power Automate foundation, and the broader Digital Transformation with AI Tools course covers the strategy layer above the tooling.

Course CTA: Power Apps and Power Automate Masterclass in Singapore — our two-day classroom programme covering cloud flows, desktop flows, sharing, scheduling, and unattended triggers, for working professionals. WSQ-funded.

Closing

You now have the three sharing paths laid out end to end. Copy-paste of actions for the free recipe handover. Portal Share for live Premium teammate access. Solution export for cross-environment and cross-tenant moves. On top of that, the scheduling and cloud-flow trigger patterns turn a shared flow into something that runs for the recipient, instead of one they have to remember to click. The honest licensing picture is the part most tutorials skip, and it is the part that decides which method you actually use in practice.

Pick one of your existing desktop flows this week and try a single method. If you have a Premium licence and a colleague on the same plan, do the portal Share — it takes less than a minute and is the cleanest demonstration. If you do not, copy the actions of your simplest subflow into a text file and send them to someone, then ask them to paste it into their Power Automate for desktop install and confirm the actions appear. Ten minutes. That is all it takes for the workflow to click into place.

I hope you’ll find this useful. Do try it out on a real flow this week — the next layer of work (scheduling, unattended runs, cross-tenant solution exports) builds straight on top of these three methods, and the practice on your own data is what makes the licensing decisions feel obvious.