clone a desktop flow

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Posted on by johnwang08

I tried to clone desktop flow.
there are 2 ways to do it,
1. use "Save As"

click the desktop flow in the solution, and then on top menu there is "Save As"

but the new target desktop flow cannot be found when trying to add it to a new target solution.

and the new target desktop flow can be opened in PAD designer, but cannot be saved.

2. use "Create a copy" in PAD console,

But this target flow is greyed out, and is not editable.

Any idea what is the proper way to clone a desktop flow?
Microsoft suggest to copy actions per subflow, but it is not practical, as my desktop flow has 40+ subflows, and each subflow has 100+ actions.

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Power Automate Desktop

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trice602 16,239 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi there!

This is common and has happened to many of us, including myself. Here's my best guess based on past experiences:

The root cause is some of those actions have been updated and they won't work in the PAD version you are trying to copy to. They run fine in the PAD version you are copying from but they won't copy to the new version coping to.

I remember a long time ago, there was a version that allowed spaces in subflow names and then taken away, those subflows will never copy into the new version and that's what you are seeing is older actions that will not copy.

Sorry, I know that's not the answer you might have been looking for but pretty confident.

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johnwang08 12 on at

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Thank you Tom for your advises.
We still do not have the clue of the real cause. but as you mentioned many people encountered the same problem, so we might have conclusion that "Create a copy" is not a reliable solution.

Actually Microsoft recommended to create target desktop flow with empty subflows from scratch, and then copy (Ctrl A, Ctrl C) /paste (Ctrl V) all actions for each subflow.

I think Microsoft should provide the feature to clone a solution with absolute isolation between source solution and target solution.

John

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