One of the most fantastic parts of Microsoft Power Automate is its ability to connect to a massive array of other systems to push and pull data. Early on this was restricted to those systems that Microsoft had created connections to or had worked with external vendors to develop connections to their systems.

In recent years, however, they added the ability for people to create their own connectors to external systems and to share those connectors with the community at large. There are now a huge number of Microsoft-approved community-created connectors available for Power Automate. In this post, I want to highlight a few of my favorites.

DadJokesIO

I’m a dad. And I love dad jokes. The more they make you groan, the better. With this connector, you can connect to DadJokes.IO and get dad jokes randomly, by ID, by type, or search the jokes by keyword. It’s what every dad programmer needs.

Buy Me A Coffee

Buy Me A Coffee allows people to add a link on their blog site to let people toss them a few bucks if something they posted was of value. This connector will allow a user to retrieve lists of people who have supported them, giving you a way to automate thanking those people by way of a Power Automate flow.

Zoom Meetings

This connector is somewhat limited, but since there is no official Zoom connector, it’s better than nothing. It will allow you to create meetings, get a list of upcoming meetings, and get the details of a specific meeting. I would love to see them add the ability to delete/update meetings, but this is a good start.

xkcd

I love Randall Munroe’s xkcd comics. This connector will let you retrieve either the details (title, alt text, URL, and more) of a specific comic by ID or get the details about the current comic.

Unsplash and Pexels

Many of the images I use with my blog posts are public domain images taken from one of these two sites: Pexels and Unsplash. They almost always have something that fits what I need. These two connectors–Unsplash and Pexels--will help you to search and retrieve images from either site based on your search terms, which can come in handy if you need randomly generated images for one purpose or another.

National Park Service

Did you know the US National Park Service has a publically accessible API that you can use to get alerts, news releases, activities, articles, images, and other information about various national parks? This connector lets you tap into that API to get that information.

NASA Image and Video Library

In one of my blog posts about creating a custom connector, I tapped into the NASA API to get the image of the day for a tweet. This connector taps into another portion of the NASA API, their image and video library. It lets you search their entire media library for content related to keywords you pass in. And they have a lot of fantastic imagery for people to peruse.

The official JIRA connector for Power Automate is somewhat….lacking. This connector gives you access to one of the features of the API that is missing from the official connector: issue search.

Meme

Do you like memes? This connector lets you pull random memes from either all of reddit or from a specific subreddit if you prefer. It returns all kinds of info about the meme, including the subreddit, title, author, and whether it’s NSFW.

RegEx Matching

How about a connector that’s useful for more than fun? This connector will let you check whether a string matches one of a set list of patterns, such as email, Social Security Number, credit card, or GUID, whether it starts or ends with a specified character, whether it contains a digit or whether it matches a custom pattern you provide. I would certainly use some caution regarding what data you’re passing in, as in I certainly wouldn’t use it for credit cards or SSNs, but it could have some uses.

Ron Swanson Quotes

I wasn’t a huge fan of Parks and Rec, but I love Ron Swanson and his words of wisdom. This connector lets you tap into a public API that shares the best. Get random quotes or search by keyword.

Sessionize

This connector lets you tap into the Sessionize API to get the list of sessions and speakers for a conference. You have to know the ID for the conference, so it’s really only useful for conference owners, but that’s still a hugely useful list of information to have and automate in Power Automate.

More

There are a ton of other connectors out there from the community. Whether you’re looking for Star Wars or Lord of the Rings information, want to get the weather forecast, want to automate your Philips HUE lights, or tap into Discord webhooks, there are custom connectors for those and a whole lot more.

It’s amazing to not only see the community support for Power Automate but the support that Microsoft is providing for reviewing and “officially” supporting them in the system.

If you’ve got an API that would benefit from Power Automate, I recommend you submit it and get it added to the ever-growing list of community-provided connectors.