How to Learn Microsoft Power Automate - Full Tutorial (2022)

microsoft power automate is straight forward to work with in this video i'll show you everything you need to get started building your own automated flows and i'll even show you how easy it is to implement ai my name is anna jensen let's get started to find microsoft power automate go to alvis.com and then we sign in either with this red button or up in the right corner sign in with your microsoft credentials i will do the same this will take us to the office front page click these nine dots up here and find power automate down here we are now in power automate ready to create our first flow let's create a flow that will save every attachment whenever we receive an email so click create over here in this left menu we will choose an automated cloudflow because we want a trigger that is something to happen that is whenever we receive an email with an attachment so i click here we will give our flow a name i can call this save email attachment like this and then we'll search for triggers so i'll say when a new email and here you can see we have a lot of emails triggers i will choose that when a new email arrives i will pick the one from office 365 outlook i'll take that one we could have chosen all other types of triggers to start our power automate flow it's very powerful and i click create so this is our flow builder if flow always comes with a trigger like here that is whenever we receive an email and then we can configure the actions downwards from from the top it is done sequential so whenever we add actions this one is the trigger then the first action will be performed and we will move on when we proceed in the actions let me show you because when i click this new step we can see all the connectors available here we have ai builder desktop flows whatever but if i just click this build in we can see other functions we can see the standard functions some excels and teams there's even more to it than this one here we also have these premium ones these require a premium of a subscription that is just a standard business subscription like the one you probably have now so what we need to do is that whenever an email arrives we want to do something with each of the attachments in the email i will find an apply to each so if i say apply to each i can just type some of it and these results come up here you can see that this is a control so if i click here i will just need to select an output pump from previous steps and that will be the attachments from up here but first let's make our trigger a little bit more specific so i just go click here this is a nice way just to edit your triggers and actions just clicking here you can see that it will listen in my inbox folder that is fine but i click the show advanced options i don't want to build a full solution here in the development phase so i only want to save the attachments whenever i received an email from myself so a simple solution i can easily just remove my name here then it will work on all emails i will make sure to include attachment because those are the ones i need to work with i can also say only with attachments yes i only want this trigger to run whenever there's an email with an attachment it doesn't make sense to run without any attachments to the email so this is it i'll just close this one here now here now the clever part comes i can select an output to use here in this apply to each and i will select the output that this trigger generates to do so i just click in here and this dynamic content menu shows up very clever if for somehow it doesn't show up it will look like this you can just click this little plus here it will show up it can also be gone if you let me show you if we do this it will look like this you can't find it this is simply just because you'll it's not wide enough so you need to maximize your window and you'll find it here so what we need here is that we need the attachments so i will scroll a little bit down i can also search for it here here you can see the attachments if i just search here you can see that i find all the dynamic content from the trigger with er that has the name attachments in it make sure you take this one attach mints so this one is the output from here that is all the attachments a male can hold either zero then we will not look at it hence our triggers but we can have one two or more attachments this applied to each will just loop through each of these attachments we need a place to save these attachments this could be sharepoint dropbox or onedrive as we will use in this video we will open up onedrive you can either open in your file explorer or as we do just in the cloud it will synchronize so it doesn't matter but i'll need to create a folder there which i can save my documents too so again i open onedrive i click the nine dots here in the office page then i open up one so this is my onedrive folder i'll create a new folder for this exercise so i just click new here and i'll say fold i will call this live just then i'll click create so this is the folder that i will use i can navigate into it and here i'll create another folder called email attachments new folder email attachments this is the place my email attachments will go whenever i receive an email with an attachment in back to power automate so this is my flow now inside this apply for each this is very important since we will do it on each of the attachments i'll click add an action this connector menu comes up again here i want to search for create file i will need to do it in the onedrive for business but if you don't have a business account say you have a personal account or school account you will need to use just search for onedrive you will need to use the onedrive actions they are almost the same as business not a lot of difference there but since i have a business account you most likely have a business account as well if it's on your work then you will just click this one drive for business and now you can see all the actions that we can take our action will be to create a file so i click here we need a folder path a name of the file and then the file content let me show you so the folder path that is where we want to save this attachment so if i click here on this one here this is the root of my onedrive i click this arrow here i go deeper down in my onedrive i want to save it here in the live subfolder so i click the live email attachments that is where my email attachments will go so i just click here the file name now another clever part comes because this attachments has a lot of parameters to test you can get all sorts of information out regarding your attachment i'll just get the name so if i go down here go to the dynamic content and let's try to search for this one here i'll say attachment name and we will use this one here so this one will be the name of the attachment the file content that will be found similarly i can just do this one here say content and choose the attachments content what happened here well our mouse was up here we needed it to go down here it's very easy to fix just click sex place your mouse down here and here you'll see that it automatically suggests that we use the attachment content just click on that now we actually have created a working flow if we start this this will run until we pause it every day every minute every second whenever we receive an email so why don't we test it one important thing is to click save so i click save here this will save my flow now this flow actually runs so we can actually test it if i click test here i'll click manually save and test in a few seconds it will say that to see it work now send a new email in your inbox so let's do so i will open up a new email here i need to send it to myself like this and we also need an attachment remember our trigger will only run whenever we have an attachment in this one here so i will just right click i'll create a new file here on my desktop so right click new text document it's just a very simple file i'll attach it to my email if i click send here i'll just send it without a subject that is fine i'll open this and then you will see whenever this email got sent you'll see that our flow runs so i'll fast forward around 15 seconds and here we can actually see a log if i click this one here you can see that this ran we can even download the outputs if i click here you can see a lot of information about our email here is you can see for example my instagram signature and the email that got in here and a lot of other things we don't need to worry about that we can also click the apply to each here we can see that it says show one of one this indicates that we only have one attachment to the email if i click the create file we can see that we created a file in the folder path live email attachments that is in my onedrive and it's called new text document if i go to my onedrive that one we have opened here open up my email attachments my document now got saved and because my onedrive synchronized to this computer let me show you here this is my onedrive folder if i go into the live email attachments is also here so no magic involved we could create a flow with just two actions very very easy with no code congratulations you build your first power ultimate blow if we go to power automate once more here we have the history if i click this little arrow up here this will take us to the log page here we can find details about our flow we can see the 28-day run history we only have this flow to be run once i can click here and then we will get the log data about our flow once more if we wanted that let me click back again we can also see the connections used we used the office 365 outlook that was to listen to the emails and then we will use the one drive connector one drive for business so you can also guess get some process insights it will work even better when we have more data don't worry about that so say you are on the home page you just logged in and you need to find the flow that you just created you can click on my flows and because i already had a flow that's called save email attachments that's actually in my everyday production flow it's called 2 here that's just the way it is to edit it you can just click this little pencil here and if you click these three dots we can do a lot edit is the same as here we can share it make there's someone from our teams owners of this flow only do that if you want them to edit it we can save as that will save a copy of it with another name we can send a copy that's great if you want to share it with someone from your team but you don't want them to edit on your flow you'll just send them a copy that's a separate brands that they can work on we can export it to a zip file we can see our run history that was the one we clicked on to see whenever our flow ran some analytics we can turn it off say we don't want to have it run but we want to have it listen to our email inbox then i just click turn off finally i could delete it however i will not do it right now because we will come back a great place to start whenever we want to learn power automate is the template section find it over here in the left by clicking the templates here you can find a lot of templates you can even find templates that's almost the same as we just created a great great great benefit of this is that you can dissect it so say you want to learn something about sharepoint flows then you can just search for the sharepoint by clicking enter these are all the sharepoint templates available you can click one of them and then you can see how microsoft built a sharepoint flow let me show you so if i search for sharepoint item like this we will take this one here when an item in the sharepoint list is modified send an email so if i click you can see that these are the connections we need to have a sharepoint an office 365 and the office 365 users and i click continue here i need a sharepoint site address and a sharepoint list name i prepared that so if i go back to my office i click these nine dots up here find my sharepoint that one is here and open it so here i have my sharepoint site i'll use the one called companylive it's just a sample demo site and here i created a list it's called docs it has three items in it one two and three that's the idea the names are here and the h are here so the logic here is that whenever we modify this list an existing item then we want something to happen so now this whenever we edit in sharepoint is our trigger let's go back to mate because i need to provide the sharepoint site address i click this one here and i pick the company live and it will automatically find my docs list so i just pick it here and then i click create so this one will have our flow created this is a standard one we want to edit and we want to learn from it so if i click edit here you can see that this is the way it looks when an existing item is modified here so whenever we modify an item in our list something will happen this is our trigger this one will get our profile that is just the office profile 365 that is information about me and here you can say see that we send an email to ourself whenever this happens this will have some information and will not dig into it but this is a really really great way to learn just to go through some of the templates we can even try it because we have set it up it will run so if i go up here to my sharepoint list and say that i just want to edit the max one here so let's give max the make him one year younger i will click save here and then my flow will run before we click the test and then it waited for it you can wait forever here because we have not clicked test however our flow will run because we created it and beware of that whenever you create a flow it will run until you stop it or delete it so if i click back here in a few seconds when i refresh this page we will have a run here because we edited a an item in our list so if i just click refresh here so wait some seconds and then you can click refresh here on this page if i do so you can see that it ran 18 seconds ago so if i click in here you can also see the log just as before it will open up and while it does that well it's here you can see that each of these actions the trigger and the actions run successfully hence this check mark if i open up my email and see if we have an email we do this is it so this is the email that we send it here with some custom dynamic information in it you can see your item two was modified by anna jensen and again blah blah blah we could add more information because this email will not make a whole lot of sense but it worked we created a simple flow from the template and we can easily modify it so so far we talked about flow types with an automated trigger that is whenever something happened and if we go up here and click create once more these are the flows that we can choose from the automated cloudflow that was when we had a trigger for example whenever we received an email or when a sharepoint item on a list was modified we also had an instant cloud flow that is whenever we press a button this flow type will run a scheduled cloudflow that is whenever a certain time come in that could be four o'clock in the evening whenever that time is our flow will run so we can schedule it to run every day every hour whatever we want quite clever we also had the desktop flow that is rpa microsoft power automate for desktop i created an entire course which you can find by clicking the video up here in the right corner you can also have a business process flow that is with human intervention a bit more advanced flow type and finally we have the process advisor that is process mining whenever we take large amount of processed data from our organization put it into power automate and let our ultimate helpers automating things we will now modify our existing flow that was the one with the email attachments because it has a build in not an arrow but a thing that is not optimal let me show you so to find it just click the my flows again and take the save email attachments i will edit it so i click edit here and this one will open because whenever i send this email if an attachment has the same name as the previous one it will just get overwritten let me show you if i just minimize this and open up a new email i'll just pick an attachment with the same name and i'll send it to myself like this i'll click send and anyway my flow will run and now it will save the attachment with the same name and when an attachment is saved with the same name as the previous one it will just override the previous attachment of the previous file so let us just refresh this we can see that our flow ran fine so if i go in here to email attachments and refresh this as well we can see that we now have only one file in it it got modified a few seconds ago but it's with the same name not very clever so let's give our attachment a prefix i'll go to power automate for desktop to edit it again i just edit here and we can use the date because when the flow runs this will happen in a certain point in time we can get this date down to seconds or even milliseconds if we want it and then we can use it in the file name because this is unique that is a developer's best practice to use the date as a dynamic part so if i just go up here to this plus i can put in a step right here i'll click this plus add an action so if i just search for q and time we can get the current time here so just pick this one here this one will only get the q and time we we cannot configure it that's fine it will give us an output that is the current time so let's just try to run it i can just click test now manually save and test and now it will listen so i will send another email so email will send a lot of emails here it will be the same as before just with an attachment so then i click send and i will go back in here we can see that we are waiting for power ultimate to pick up that we just received an email this one is good that when you test it it's good to click that one because then you can just sit and wait until your flow runs i will fast forward this however to now your flow range successfully i wanted you to show the cue and time because if i click here you can see that this current time gave us an output and it's in a weird weird date time format next you see it's 2022 there it's this is july the 20th that's the day today and with the time stamp on we cannot use this in our file name it has colons and it looks really really weird so for logging purposes we want to get our own time zone it's very straightforward so i click edit up here this will edit my flow again so if i click this plus here i'll click add an action so now i want to convert the time zone that we got up from the queue in time i wanted to convert it to my time zone and i also want to make sure that the date time format is in a better format so if i just search for invert time zone so like this i'll find it down here so the base time what time do i need to convert that's the output from the queue and time again i can just click in here and you can see over here q and time that is the output so if i click that one now i got that in place i need to tell power automate which time zone this is and these ones here that system generated they are always in utc so if i click this here drop down i'll scroll down to utc that one's here take that one here between minus one and zero so that one was here the destination time zone that is your time zone i'm in copenhagen so i'll pick plus one but choose wherever you are situated i'll click the code here here i can now specify how i want my date time to look like i can choose these prefixes however these are not very really well suited for my file format i'll say enter custom value and here i'll put in a little bit of the net code so month so this is basically a code for how i want my output to look like don't worry you'll learn this very very easy with just working with power automate a few times for now just write it so here i have the years month days i want the hours in a 24-hour format that is great so we don't have two equals file names so then i want minute and seconds i can also write something like ff if i wanted a millisecond however i will just go with this so if i save it now i have now saved my flow i need to apply it whenever i create my file because i will use this output from the convert time zone i'll use that in my file name if i go to apply to it go to the create file so here in the file name i will have my date before the name and will have an underscore and the attachment name so if i go down to the file name and i'll jump in front of the attachment's name now i want this converted time oh i can just pick it again from this dynamic content if i do that you can see that we have them right after each other i need an underscore in here so i'll just go one back with the arrow and have an underscore like this that's how easy it is we have now modified a flow so we don't overwrite our data and we get a nice log timestamp on our files so if i click test again i'll just manually test it like yes so to see it work let's send another email i'll say new i will run it again drag this one in send it same procedure as last time we will wait a few seconds i'll pause the video until the flow has ran there you go where our flow is running we will have our flow ran successfully right now and if i go to my email attachment here in the cloud i repress this one here you can now see that we create unique values for our unique filename values for our attachments isn't that clever but say i really want to create a folder instead instead of modifying these file names no problem very very easy i'll show you so we go back to power automate and then we'll click edit so now we will not charge the file name so i'll delete these two from here but i'll create a folder just like up here we just say folder path then we can have a forward slash and then we can have our converted time so i'll just use it up here just as before i can just test it i'll save and test and let's try to send one more email to see the result it's very very straightforward there's no magic involved in developing automation here in power automate so let's send this and our flow will run and we will have a nicely created folder again our flow ran successfully if i go into my onedrive folder you can now see that we have created a folder with the datetime and if i open that our attachment is in here similarly it will be here in my onedrive i can open it here it's also here as well but that's a logic since this cloud here this is just this desktop version is just a mirror of this so no matter here as well now as promised it is ai time very straight forward so this is the course page i prepared you'll find it in the link in the description below we'll need some sample documents because our process now will be to extract data out of documents so we will need some documents to do so you can of course use your own but let me just minimize these i have him here you can just download the sample documents you can also find them on microsoft if you prefer that just click here and choose the english documents i will just take the sample documents like here here are my documents so i will just download all of these this will go into a zip folder i'll just drag it out to my desktop so i can work with it go out right click and i'll just extract it to a folder so if i open up this folder we have 12 pdfs let me open one of them for example this is an invoice i can zoom a little bit out this is an invoice with information we want to extract the information similarly if i take this contoso tree you can see that this is since this is a pdf but it's not it's not a text pdf it's an image pdf no problem and it's the quality is quite poor no problem our flow will be able to extract the data we want out of it so let me just close this and let's create a flow that let us do what we want so i will open up my power automate once more here we will be creating a new flow but first let's look at the ai builder and how powerful and easy it is to use so if i click this ai builder over here in the left i'll click explore this one will give us a lot of pre-defined ai capabilities i can choose some of the predefined ones or i can choose the custom ones you can see this custom up here custom custom we will just choose the predefined but you can customize your own models very very easy check the video up in the right corner to see how easy it is anyway we will just click here here i can test it by clicking the upload new let's just take contoso five open it here you can see that the document will open here that's an image again it's quite poorly scanned the model will now analyze it with ai and here you can see that we actually have extracted all the information out including the items down here if i hold my mouse over you can see that we have information and a confit confidence score this is how confident our ai model is that this is the right information everything looks fine so now let's use it in the flow don't click the use in flow here you will just get a standardized flow which we can't really use so if i just click this x up here we will be creating our own so i'll click create here and first we will just manually run our flow so if i click the instant cloud flow here i can call it something i will call mine document processing like this and i'll manually trigger my flow and i'll click create and if i click this trigger i can add some input so click here i can see i can add a file if i click here again i'll say file content please select file or image we can modify the text here so i'll just say please please select document to process like this then we can add steps to it we'll do this by clicking the new step here we want to extract the information out of these documents since these are invoices we can use the predefined invoice model you don't have to use these predefined ones you can just create your owns but for simplicity we will use that one here so i'll say invoice here we'll have the extract information from invoices if i click that i can now say i want to define the invoice file that is select an invoice to process if i click here our friend comes up here this is the file content so i can just choose that one here this will fill in the file content and let's test our flow so if i just click save over here i will click test once this has saved test manually test and here you can see that it asks for file content if i click the import choose one of your documents and you'll click open and we'll click run flow so my flow will run nothing will really happen we will just extract the information out so my flow is still running now my flow range successfully and if i click in here you can see that we have actually extracted the information out for example the customer address some and the confidence scores the invoice date and invoice total so forth it works so now we can actually start to type these information into another system we will use excel here but you can use all sorts of api connectors that you want but then click edit here i'll first need to create my excel sheet that these data will go into so i'll click in microsoft office home and then i'll find the excel one if your excel is not here just click the nine dots again and find it up here so i'll open up excel and we will just create a new blank workbook book so let's just rename it and put it inside our live folder it only work when your excel document is in sharepoint or onedrive and since this one here is per default created in onedrive it will work but let's modify the information a bit i'll call this document results instead of just a blank one and then i'll click this because we'll move it to a new folder we created this live folder here so if i go in here you can see that my email attachments here let's just create it inside a folder here so i will just say plus i'll say document processing then i'll click create i'll go in there and my excel sheet will now be moved here fine then i just need to create a structure so here i'll say date in the first column then i'll say invoice number i'll say vendor and i'll say customer i'll say tax then i'll say total i can just do this just to make sure that we have here we can see everything so now i want to mark this it's very important that you do whatever i do now and then you'll click format as a table we can only work with this excel sheet if it is formatted as a table i can choose one of these designs it doesn't really matter i'll just take this blue one my table has headers yes it does it's actually only the headers i created right now the data the actual rows will come from my invoices so then i'll click ok so now you can see that it got formatted as a table let's give it a more descripting name if i click inside in this table go up to table design it's per default it is table one we all say document processing results so it's a bit more describing this is the best practice always do nice naming it will make it easier for you and your colleagues especially in the future so now we have created an output we'll go back to power automate because we want to process these information that we cut out we want to get them into excel to do so we'll find another action i'll search for add a row into a table that one is here so pick at that one we need a location and you'll just need to specify where you placed your excel sheet here you can see that we can choose between one drive sharepoint i'll just take the onedrive for business select a document library onedrive and then we'll find a file in my onedrive we called it something like live that one is here go in here we put it in the document processing folder like this and then we will choose this excel sheet so now when you click this drop down our table guard here very clever and whenever we chose our table you can see our headers here now it is just to map these things so if i click in here we will use the dynamic content that we got from up here so in the date i'll have the date and instead sometimes instead of just scrolling these things true i'll just find a date and here i'll take the invoice date as text i'll pick that one the invoice number i can just search for invoice and since there's no invoice number it's called invoice id that's fine but power automate is so clever so even though i just search for something similarly it it detects that this is the thing that we want to do and display the invoice id pretty clever now we want the vendor so if i go down here search for render i want a vendor name just you can extract all sorts of information like address and all that but feel free to do it in your own instance we'll just make it simple here so i'll take the vendor name i'll also take the customer name here so if i find the customer name like this i'll take the tags as well and this is just manual work i'll just take the total text that's text so if i search for invoice total like this take the one called invoice total text so now i have everything in place so let's test it we will test it manually once more here we are just using the excel online for business for the first time so i'll just continue here now we can import document if i import here and just pick one of these by random don't worry we'll create a flow that will process all our documents in a little bit so now i click run now my flow will run you can see that our flow is currently running again these usually take some time to process around 20 seconds so let me fast forward that's it our flow ran successfully we can go to our excel sheet let me first resize it so i click this triangle up here i double click here and here's my data that's how easy it is but you'll see that these two are in chronos not in us dollars that's because chrono is my regional format to fix that i will click here press ctrl and take the other column as well then i will click this drop down up here i'll say more number formats i'll say currency and here i'll click the drop down for cronus and then i'll find the dollar sign and i'll take the united states like this that's it i'll click ok so now these ones will come in in dollar formats let's test if it works for one of two of the other invoices so if i click here i'll click edit i'll click test once more we will test it so let's import another one here let's take the number four we will run the flow we will click done and i'll fast forward to whenever this flow has finished that's it our flow ran successfully and if i go back here a new row has been added to our data very clever but usually you will not have a flow that will just run whenever i click it that is quite manual i need to click the button i need to find the invoice so what you can do you can of course have a flow that will email you the invoice or your colleague will email one inbox and then we will extract it but you can also have a drop folder so let's create one in our onedrive i can either do it in the cloud up here or in my desktop so let me drag this one in here so here we have our live folder we'll be creating it in the document processing so i'll right click here new folder let's just call this drop folder so we want to whenever a an invoice gets dropped in this folder we want our flow to run and extract the information out of it that is quite clever let me show you but since um our action will not see if we create a new file in here this one is one in one drive and if our documents that is our invoices is also in the same one drive it will not be counted as new files so they need to come from an external place so let's just move them we have them on our desktop so if i just click this pc desktop we have them here so we want to move them and again this is just so they will be treated as new files they are in the same one drive so they're technically not files so what i will do here let me just go one back i'll just copy this or cut it then i'll just place it in the root of the c drive so i'll right click and paste or just ctrl v so now my invoices are here in the c drive i can now create my automation to make my drop folder work and let me just open up the drop folder once more those ones are in here this is my drop folder that is where i want to drop my invoices to so i go back and click edit so now we will not be manually triggered out flow if i click these three dots here and then i click delete yes that's fine i deleted my trigger we need to create once more and here we will go into the onedrive for business and then we will look for a trigger we need to look for the when a file is created so whenever a file is created in a certain folder our flow will run just this one here what folder do i want to look in here we will go to the live folder once more document processing here's our drop folder so we will look inside this there's also advanced options include subfolders well that doesn't really matter we'll just leave it as it is then we will need to change the input in here to match the output from up here so instead now you can see it disappeared because our trigger disappeared here we will just choose the file content like this now let's save it and let's test it so it's actually running we don't need to click the test we can just go out here to our overview and then we can start running it and the trigger was whenever we moved something inside our drop folder so here let me just find it so i'll go to the c drive of my computer and here i will have the one drive that was the name i call it so if i move these ones over here my automation will run if i'm moving over here i have now moved into onedrive this will take a little while this will take like one minute so i'll fast forward and then when i come back we can see the results and if i go to my flow once more i refresh it you can see that we have processed things like eight seconds ago seven seconds six four four four it looks like our flow has ram and if i go into my documents results you can see here that we have extracted all the information out of the invoices that's how easy power automate is the next lesson is here on your screen

Channel: Anders Jensen

Views: 37,692

Keywords: how to learn microsoft power automate, microsoft power automate, microsoft power automate tutorial, microsoft power automate examples, anders jensen, power automate, power automate cloud, 2022, power automate 2022, power automate beginners guide, power automate beginner, power automate beginner guide, power automate beginner tutorial, power autotomate tutorial, power automate guide, get started with power automate, power automate course, beginners guide power automate

Id: YVr2JgODps0

Length: 46min 27sec (2787 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2022