WonderLaura @iwmentor – Laura Rogers

Did you know there’s a (very simple) form builder hiding inside Power Automate? It’s true. Power Automate input parameters let you collect information from someone the moment they kick off a flow — and you don’t need Microsoft Forms, a SharePoint list form, or any form product at all. The form builds itself.

In this week’s Power Hour (video below), I did a deep dive into Power Automate input parameters: what they are, all six input types, how to share flow buttons with your team, and how to use them with the SharePoint For a selected item trigger. Let’s get into it.

💡 What Are Power Automate Input Parameters?

Here’s the thing: most flows I build in the real world are automated. They kick off on their own when an item gets created or modified in a SharePoint list or library, and end users never interact with them directly.

But sometimes a person needs to start a process — an approval, a file review, a request. That’s a manually triggered flow, and that’s where Power Automate input parameters come in. Instead of just clicking “Run flow,” the person gets a little form to fill out first, and everything they type becomes data you can use anywhere in the flow.

A few important things to know up front:

• Input parameters only apply to flows that a person starts — the Manually trigger a flow trigger and the SharePoint For a selected item / For a selected file trigger.
• There’s no visual form designer. You just add inputs, and each one automatically becomes a field in the Run flow panel. The order you add them is the order they appear (and no, you can’t rearrange them — you’d have to delete and re-add them).
• Every input is a required field in the form by default, but you can make any of them optional.

🛠️ The Six Input Types

When you add an input to your trigger, you get six types to choose from:

1. Text — a simple text box
2. Yes/No — a boolean toggle
3. File — lets the person attach a file
4. Email — this is really a people picker, which is handy
5. Number — numbers only
6. Date — a date picker

Now here’s the hidden menu I mentioned in the video title. Click the ⋯ (ellipsis) next to any text input, and you’ll find some powerful options:

• Make the field optional (or required again)
• Add a drop-down list of options — the person picks one
• Add a multi-select list of options — the person can pick several

That little menu is easy to miss, and it’s what turns a plain text box into real data validation. No more hoping people type the department name correctly — give them a drop-down.

📋 Demo: A Purchase Request Flow

To show off all the input types, I built a purchase request form using nothing but Power Automate input parameters:

1. What is the item? — Text
2. Department — Text with a drop-down list (IT, Accounting, PR)
3. Category — Text with a multi-select list (hardware, software, and so on)
4. Cost — Number
5. Need by — Date
6. Approver — Email (remember, it’s a people picker)
7. Is this a rush order? — Yes/No
8. Quote attachment — File, set to optional

Then I added a Condition to check whether “Is this a rush order?” is equal to true. If it is, the flow sends an email to the approver with the importance set to High and “RUSH” in the subject line. If not, it sends a normal one. That’s the part I love about input parameters — they don’t just fill in blanks in an email. They can drive the logic of your flow and even decide who the email goes to.

Here’s what the initiation form looks like when you click to manually start the flow:

🎁 Bonus Data You Get for Free

When someone fills out the form, the trigger gives you more than just their answers. You automatically get dynamic content for the person’s name, email address, a timestamp, and even their location — city, state, postal code, latitude and longitude from their browser or mobile device. I used the person’s name in my email subject line: “New purchase request from so-and-so.” [enter their display name]

👥 Who Gets the Button? Run-Only Users

By default, you’re the owner of your flow and you’re the only one who can run it. To hand the button to other people, open the flow’s details page and add run-only users — individuals or even a whole group.

A few things I want you to know about this:

1. When you add someone, they get an email with a link to manually trigger the flow. You can grab that hyperlink and put it anywhere — like a button right on your SharePoint home page — so people don’t have to go digging through Power Automate to find it.
2. Run-only users also see the flow in the Power Automate mobile app, under Instant Flows. They tap it, fill out the same little form, and go. Great for folks out in the field.
3. Here’s the powerful part: when you add run-only users, you can choose whose connections the flow uses. If the flow saves data to a SharePoint list the person doesn’t have access to, you can set the SharePoint connection to run as you, the flow creator. The person filling out the form never needs access to that list or library. This capability is only available on manually triggered flows — automated flows don’t have run-only users at all. This example only shows an Outlook connector, but it will list all of the connectors used in your flow.

If you’ve been around SharePoint as long as I have, that last one might ring a bell — it’s the modern answer to the old “impersonation step” we had in SharePoint Designer workflows.

Also note that in this demo, I didn’t actually SAVE or add the data anywhere. I only sent it in an email. So if you wanted to save the information that was filled in, you’d need to add an action to create an item in SharePoint or your database of choice like Dataverse.

📂 Power Automate Input Parameters in SharePoint

Now let’s bring this into SharePoint, because Power Automate input parameters aren’t just for the manual trigger. The For a selected item trigger (for lists) and For a selected file trigger (for libraries) let people run your flow on a specific item, right from SharePoint — and yes, you can add the same inputs to these triggers.

I built one on my Policies library:

1. Create a new flow with the For a selected file trigger, and pick your site and library.
2. Click Add an input and add what you need. I added a Message (text) and a Policy date (date).
3. Now, here’s the gotcha: this trigger does not give you the metadata from the item. You only get the basics plus your inputs. So always add a Get file properties action (or Get item for a list) right after the trigger, using the ID from the trigger.
   I honestly consider this a bug. Why wouldn’t the trigger just include the item’s fields? But once you add it, all your columns show up as dynamic content.
4. From there, I sent an email to the Policy owner (a column in my library) with the message from the input and a link to the file.
   Tip: the “Link to item” dynamic content is a big ugly URL, so I wrapped it in a simple HTML hyperlink in the email body that just says “Click here to open the file.”
5. I also added an Update file properties action to take the Policy date the person filled in and stamp it right onto the file’s metadata.

To run it, you select a file in the library, open the Integrate menu, and click your flow.

The input panel slides out on the right side of the screen, the person fills it in, and off it goes. In my demo, the email arrived and the Policy date column updated almost instantly.

And here’s why this matters: SharePoint’s new built-in approvals setting can send a simple approval with a message, but it’s one-size-fits-all. With Power Automate input parameters, you completely control what data gets collected, what the email says, who it goes to, and what happens to the item afterward. More complex to setup, but more flexibility.

⚡ Take It Further: A One-Click Button with Quick Steps

For the grand finale, I connected this flow to the new Quick Steps feature in SharePoint:

1. Copy your flow’s ID — it’s the GUID in the flow’s URL, between the last slash and the question mark.

2. In your library, create a new Quick Step that executes a flow for selected files, and paste in the flow ID.

3. You can even display the button conditionally — I set mine to only show when the Policy owner column is not empty, since the flow emails the policy owner.

4. Then add a Quick Step column to your view, pick your quick step, and give the button a color.

Now there’s an easy, obvious button sitting right in the library view. One click, the input panel pops up, and the flow runs.

💰 One More Thing: Licensing

This question came up in the chat, so let’s clear up a big misconception: you do not need a separate Power Automate license for any of this. Standard connectors like SharePoint and Outlook are included with something as simple as an E1 Microsoft 365 license. A separate Power Automate license only comes into play when you use premium connectors. I’ve been building flows for years on a standard license and have never been billed extra.

🎬 Wrap-Up

So that’s the full circle: from a simple manual trigger with a “hidden form,” to mobile buttons, to run-only users, to running flows on selected files in SharePoint with a one-click colored button. Power Automate input parameters are one of those features that look small but unlock a whole category of solutions — collecting structured information from people without building a single form. No developer required.

What would you put a button on? Have you used input parameters in your flows, or is this new to you? Let me know in the comments.

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📺 Watch the full Power Hour episode: This Hidden Menu Changes How You Build Power Automate Flows

🎓 Want to go deeper? Check out my Power Automate courses at IW Mentor — and the Ultimate plan includes every course plus live Q&A calls with me and my team every three weeks, where you can bring your own flows and get unstuck.

📅 Join me live for Power Hour every Wednesday at 11am Central — see the schedule at iwmentor.com.

Resources

My post about quick steps

My post about SharePoint out of box approvals