How to Use Microsoft Copilot In Power Automate Flows for Smarter Automation

hello everyone and welcome to Power Hour I'm Laura Rogers and here's Joelle jobson in the window and this is a show we do Wednesdays at 11 this topic today is Microsoft co-pilot with Microsoft power automate and building flows based on AI based on natural language and AI actually will generate the flows for us and it gives you a way to create flows and edit flows using natural language and suggesting things to you so this is going to be a really fun episode and let's do the stinger [Music] all right again I'm Laura Rogers and this is Joel jobson with IW Mentor training website and this is a show we do at 11 Central on on YouTube just every most Wednesdays and this is where um we have a live chat going on it's really fun you never know what's going to happen or what I'm gonna say and we have our chat going on in teams and so wherever you're watching this video there's a link in there to click to fill out a form to request to join because each person you're basically going to be external users in teams so we'll be manually adding everybody so that's where you can request to join us in teams and if you're chatting in teams hello come say hi in the chat window roll call so um what we're going to do we'll talk about co-pilot and talk about what we can do with it and demonstrate it so first of all Microsoft came out with copilot I'll go ahead and just start sharing my screen so you can see like this beautiful splash screen that they have um let me go ahead and put my screen share on here okay it's got my face in the corner see but I think I removed your face last time because um you were doing something else so let me go add that back real quick there we go there's Joanna so what we can do with co-pilot if you're not aware Microsoft co-pilot is the new AI tool that they are implementing in Microsoft 365 and it's just rolled out just in the last couple of months it's still in preview this is all brand new and so what you can do with when you're building a flow in power automate you have a few different things that you can do in there first of all you can create a brand new flow from scratch and you can see that right here on the home page when you go to make.powerautomate.com and log in right there on the home page it says start building your flow with copilot and that means you can just start typing like natural language so that's the first thing we'll be doing is just creating a flow you can also edit an existing flow with copilot so you can create the flow and then edit that same one with copilot you can also go edit existing pass flows flows that you already that already existed you can go edit them with co-piloted as well because it's a sort of a different flow editing interface that they've created you can also ask it questions about the flow like about the actual actions in the flow like why would I want to use this action what is this action for or what does this setting mean you can ask it questions just based on like the that might be in the documentation you can ask questions about the current flow say um you know what happens when a maintenance request approval gets rejected and you can ask it questions and it will tell you in natural language what's going on in that flow and um something to note is that co-pilot exists in the powered automate desktop program as well so they've added it in there so what we're going to do is we'll get started just talking about some ideas for building your flow with Copilot and I'm going to go into I'm actually going to go into my um the new Power Hour tenant and go into um that interface there so this is basically where I do the demos for the show and where you all are in you know in the chat and the same tenant so this is where I'm going to start of course it's letting me know about the new navigation so what it's doing is it's the first thing we see on this home screen is that it's suggesting things that I might want to ask it to do so um and even when I put my cursor in here it even gives me a few suggestions so it says it's just kind of giving me ideas for things that I can ask it like do I want to post to teams when a new question is posted um post an item in a SharePoint list when a task is completed just some like General ideas so I'm gonna say um when oops a new maintenance request Spilled Out send and approval to the requesters manager and then send the requester an email letting them know the outcome all right that's a lot right and see what happens so I told it maintenance request but I didn't tell it where the maintenance request was or what kind of item that is or what kind of database or anything that it's in so since I didn't tell it it just is going to guess and it's going to guess at as Microsoft form so it's going to say all right we're assuming you have a maintenance request that is a Microsoft form so that it's sort of its default for if you just tell it just some generic name of a form excuse me without telling it what database it's in or if it's in SharePoint or if it's a SharePoint list item so it's it's giving me um it's basically laying out what the flow is going to entail so it's going to say okay it's going to start when a new response is submitted as a Microsoft form it's going to go get the details it's going to start the approval and then it's going to have the condition of whether the approval gets a gets approved or not so I can look and see what it looks like and I can also say show a different suggestion and I can just make it regenerate and start all over and kind of rethink and maybe get something different that I want to tell me so I'll just go ahead and click next and when I do that it's showing me on the right um just a sort of General overview of the flow and then it's telling me which connectors that I'm going to be using and if it's going to have like a connector that I've never used before it's going to prompt me I'll have to let it create that connector so these are all connectors that forms approvals Outlook all connectors that I've used before so it's going to go ahead and create the flow now this is a really long flow name so when I knew maintenance request is filled out send an approval address blah blah blah that's the whole that's the name of the flow up here so I'm just going to rename it new maintenance requests so now I'm gonna give it a better name and I can see look at this cool interface Joelle isn't this slick like this little layout the whole thing looks totally different so when I click on different actions in here it's giving me where I used to have to I would have the settings and kind of what I'm filling in right there in the middle of the form each action that I click on is just popping up this little panel and I can just quickly click from panel to panel and I can even minimize this as I go so I see like a overview over here of what it's been doing it tells me what I asked it that's my verbiage I use and then it's telling me kind of what all it did so this is like a rolling sort of log of what's happening in your flow so then so it shows me my float now it's going to have all these invalid parameters because it wants me to fill in like which specific form it is and which so it's going to have some missing like required fields in some of these actions so it's up to me to go ahead and fill them in so for example I the only form I have is is the Power Hour Chat sign up so I can actually do this very quickly I can go to forms it's not microsoft.com and there's AI when you're building forms too so they make this really easy so I'm going to say new form and I'll just call it a maintenance request and then I'm not going to worry about trying to make it look pretty or anything but look how it's suggesting as soon as I say that it's a maintenance request it's already suggesting questions that I asked that that I you know that I want to ask when people fill out this request so I'm just going to pick a few of these what's your budget blah blah blah blah so it's giving me all these suggestions so I'll just add all the ones that I clicked and now I have a new maintenance request so this is really simple so my maintenance request now exists and then now the trick here is that this I'm still just on this screen it hasn't refreshed or anything so um that this part is going to be a little bit awkward because since I'm already in this flow like I can't save it and go back out of it because um it doesn't have all the required Fields filled in so since I created this Microsoft form after I already created the flow and this flow just doesn't see it in the list yet because it's it just this interface hasn't refreshed what I'm going to do is I'll go into forms and just this is something you can manually do if you ever have created a form and you don't see it in your flow or in the list of forms to pick from I'm just going to say just grab the ID of that flow I'm sorry the ID of the form and then I'm just going to put this in here so that part's a little bit awkward the fact that you probably would want to create your form first and then that way you'd have the form to pick from that so that's just kind of a weird order that I did that in but then when I do get response details I just have to do the same thing just paste the ID of that form in there so now at least it's filled out and it doesn't have an error so then it's asking me what kind of approval what type do I want and I'll just say first to respond and then um I didn't tell it who to send it to so let's try let's try this so I'm going to say um after the trigger get the requesters manager and send the approval to that manager so it's kind of like behind joelle's head here let me see if I can move your head a little bit um uh position let's see take your what is it next there that's better right yeah I moved you uh so your face is in in front of the the verbiage I'm typing okay so I'll go ahead and hit play and then it's thinking about it it's um thinking about how it's going to build that and then oh I don't understand your request okay after the trigger get the requester's manager and I'll just give it that one little thing to do first all right see there we go so it goes and it adds this Office 365 you can watch it like it's all just moving in front of my face so I'm like I don't want to touch it so you can see right before my very eyes it's going and it's using that Office 365 um users connector and it's getting my profile and getting my profile I'm not sure if that's gonna get me what I need I really need it to do the get manager action so let's see if it um see if it gets I don't know if my manager is going to be in there I've never used the get my profile action to get my manager use the get manager get very very specific I did build one right before we got started like before we did this I did build one and it did actually use the get manager action so I know it's possible okay um to get flow ready finish that yeah it's telling me that I have to finish setting some things up all right I'm just going to keep going so I'm going to say it starts and waits for an approval and then I want it I want to see if I can get it to edit the approval to actually modify the approval that's already here to see if it can add the manager to be the approver but so you can use natural language to generate the whole flow but then while you're editing the flow you can easily just manually add actions but you can also use verbiage to add actions so I'm going to go ahead and add that look at this interface this is really slick um get manager Office 365 users get manager that's really the action I wanted it to use um but yeah I know that it can do it because it did it literally a few minutes ago so it's again it's in preview it's still kind of buggy notice how this interface works though this is really interesting I love this new slick interface you click the little lightning bolt it to get to where you usually you know get to all of your Dynamic content so I've got my um that's the get my profile when it gets your profile it doesn't have your manager it's going to have oh it's going to have the profile just of the person who filled it out so I'm just literally just going to put responders email as the person whose manager I'm getting that way whenever somebody fills out the form it's automatically going to have that person's email address even if they don't fill out an email address box so it gets the manager and I don't even really need this get my profile one so now I want to see if once I've gotten the manager if it will just edit the approval action to put the manager in there without me having to know how to click and and open up the settings so add manager as the approver very very simple instructions let's see um let's see did it do it um no yeah it's just not understanding it's not understanding that that's fine okay so I'll go ahead and say approve Quest I'm just gonna do this pretty quickly for the dynamic content so you notice I can use this this is the function box which is greatly improved look at that did you see that so I've got the dynamic content is a little lightning bolt or I can say like I want the email address of the manager but the um the little the function is the expression this is the expression box that you've seen in the you know in the regular flow interface and it's got a nice huge box that it gives you to write expressions if you need to do that so that's a that's a really interesting thing to note so I don't have an item in this case it's just a maintenance request coming in as a Microsoft form so I haven't I haven't done anything with SharePoint I haven't create told it to create anything in SharePoint so for this approval I literally would just have to put the verbiage of what was in the main what was filled out in the maintenance request just in uh in the body here so I'll just put just a one or two things um and then I'll put so I've got to go to my Dynamic content this is way this is much easier to read here so um my request is going to be like what type of construction project is it um requested by and I'll just put this Dynamic content of the person that filled in the form I'll just put the responders let's see full name yeah I don't have a link to give them um these settings code View and testing all this is exactly what you're used to seeing just in the regular flow interface it's just all organized in a different way so again I really like this slick interface okay so now I've put who to send the approval to filled out all the required fields for the approval and then it needs to send the email so when I wrote this whole thing out at the beginning I said to send it an email to the requester so it didn't fill in the requester but I can do that I can go ahead and just um use the little Dynamic content to go find my requester responders email and I can say request approved all good okay and then I can do the same thing those are all required fields and I can do the same thing with this other email notice my little errors went away when I did that um notice also that you can rename these at the top it's got an easy little as soon as you just put your cursor up here I'll just put rejection email and I'm going to send that one to the responder as well responders email request rejected all right sorry okay I'm just trying to make this really quick so I went ahead and filled everything in I can move this little panel out of the way I love the way that I can just click between all these different boxes and just quickly be able to edit them like that and be able to just kind of scroll around here all right so I'll move this out of the way if you ever want to delete an action like this one I don't need it it added it for me I didn't need it I'll go ahead and pull this panel out and then just choose delete and then that's just again a new way to do it and as you go you're going to have copile if you don't see co-pilot over on the right here you can just click copilot here and that will move the panel out of the way but I'm going to go ahead and save this and then I'll need to just to run this and just to watch it go and see what it looks like in this new interface I'll go ahead and fill out one of these maintenance requests so I'll just go back here now this is going to look the same um this list of my flows is going to look the same I'm just when I go back into edit it I can choose edit to go back to the old interface or I can go edit with copilot which is going to take me to that slick new copilot interface so I'll go ahead and fill out this request and I'll preview it and I didn't make all these required um so I'll just say what type of construction groundwork it's going to give me a date picker there I think that's everything I need and I just have it as the responder's email address as what the flow is looking at so I don't necessarily need to ask the person their email address when I'm just using the responder as who I'm sending things to in my flow I could just not even have this field on the form so I'll go ahead and submit that notice this is just um just off you know just as a side note forms now has this save my response option so you can actually save your response so you can refer to it later so it's not like completely lost um but you so you can actually have it save it to your own forms list of forms you filled out okay now let's go see if this ran oh it failed let's go see what happened so what I just did is I clicked edit so notice that I clicked edit and I didn't click edit with copilot so this is giving me an error and well so this is giving me the old interface and giving me an error now I don't have a manager so I should have thought of that when I built this flow that I am in this little fake Tenon here and I don't actually have a manager in my tenant that's going to be based on my active directory profile to see who my manager is in the directory I don't have a manager so let me go back and edit this with copilot and just for demos I don't like to have to log in as different people and flip back and forth all the time so I'm just going to not get my manager I'm going to delete that and I'm just going to put myself in here just so I'm the one that's going to get the approval so you'll be able to see it running so I'm going to say I literally could just type my own little fake email address in here but I'm going to go ahead and just put the responder's email so in the real world you wouldn't necessarily have the responder sending an approval to themselves but again I just want to see this whole thing in action okay so then I can test this again notice this test flow looks very similar to what you're used to when you're testing flows do you have any questions so far Joel um oh oh good point Josh if you can copy and paste is it not refreshing good question yeah yeah see if it sent me a um didn't send my approval yet one where a place that I can go look real quick to see if I got my approval one place is going to be just go back to that main interface here and if I don't feel like waiting for the email sometimes this in this interface you're going to see it here in the approvals list way before you get the email like a good minute or two so here is my room request it's actually in here I did receive it I'm just being impatient I didn't want to wait for the email so I'll just go ahead and approve this yes there we go so that is let's go watch the flow running so you can see it's got those pretty little check boxes just like the other interface and it um it shows me that it did get approved the condition was true and it sent the email and again that one could take a minute too but it shows me all the details about who it sent the email to so it's just a different interface for getting those details and and looking at the flow history and you know what it's been doing so another thing that I can let's go do a different flow so um just a quick note again I mentioned this but you can go these are all older flows you can go into older flows and click to edit them with copilot I want to show you a couple of different ways you can create these so when I created this uh the first one I created I just started from this box right here I want to show you the other methods that you can use to get to that create with copilot screen you can go to create here and you can choose describe it to design it that is the copilot option also when you're on my flows and you click new flow you can click on describe it to design it here as well so those are just a couple of other ways that you can get to kind of the same interface this one's got this beautiful little wizard that it pulls up and it's telling you that AI can blah blah blah go next so so this is again that same kind of prompt of giving you suggestions of what to ask it to create whatever your business for whatever your business purpose purpose is now I I was telling Joel a few minutes ago that I um was thinking of ideas of things to ask power automate so I asked um ask chat GPT some ideas of what to ask power automate so I thought that was pretty pretty entertaining that um one robot is telling me what to ask another robot [Music] started with another new one oh Glenna said try the create sites okay create I'm just gonna try something very simple like just the create a site thing and see if it knows how to do that create a SharePoint site called HR department put it in quotes even I'm giving it it's like very very simple let's see we're trying to see if it will create a SharePoint site because that would be awesome oh no flow suggestions sorry Glenna do an HTTP call to create I wonder if you put that in there just curious do an HTTP call HTTP call to create a circle inside oh the trigger is button um oh yeah look at that that's interesting okay let's see what that has in it great flow hmm okay it says send an HTTP request a SharePoint look at that so it's got site addresses required how do you have a site address if you don't have a site yet what do you usually fill in what would you usually fill in for the site if you're sending an HTTP request to create a site maybe just the route the URI usually oh I don't know if that's what it's wanting I can't see my um or is there a URL yeah the URI is down here so it's like you know why site templates um so I don't know if that's actually yeah it doesn't have anything in here about like what the name of the site is and I don't see any kind of [Music] um call parameter that tells it to create a site so yeah yeah so it's a little lacking it's a little lacking so at least it used the action that I told it to use but um yeah it didn't quite actually put the functionality in there to create a SharePoint site good try um uh well you're not supposed to create subsites Glenna subsides aren't a thing so no we're not doing it sometimes I don't think it would do that either though um Microsoft really does not want you to create subsites they want you to use hubs and hub sites yeah that's funny okay so the other let's see what I'm gonna do I'm just gonna go to one of these um chat gbt suggestions so I'll go do new flow describe it to design it and again it's giving me all these cool suggestions um like when a response is received in forms create a task then post a message to teams um okay so let's see I'm gonna say um look at my little questions that chat gbt gave me and I'm going to say um oh it's got one that says automatically shortlist your HR candidates like hiring candidates based on AI driven criteria well I don't think that's gonna um it's gonna have what we need in it let's see um organize contracts I'll just start this with contracts we deal a lot with contracts with people doing things with contracts and like company policies and things in SharePoint um automate an approval a two level approval process oh I'll say serial approval process let's see what it does for new contracts okay four new contracts create I'll just say create there and I think I'm I think that seems pretty simple let's see what it does never know what's going to happen okay so it's saying this is the suggested flow so I can review this and I can say decide if I don't want this to be my flow and I could tell it to regenerate so let's see what it says it's going to say when an item is created in sharepoints um it's probably going to ask me where in SharePoint and I start and wait for an approval and I look for a condition and then each time when I when I get that approval response then if it's approved then it goes to the second level of approvals and then a condition and then it has an email that goes out if it's approved or rejected based on whether it was approved so I if I don't like this I can click show a different suggestion I'll just click next and it's giving me the list of connectors and I'll click create flow now this one's kind of boring because I already did an approval process so we'll just take a look at this and just kind of review what it's showing us that it's going to do when I when I tell it SharePoint it doesn't know where in SharePoint so I would have to go tell it like specifically which site and which Library um in this case I really do need a library because it's a contract but it's using the action called when an item is created so I'd have to go I'd have to pick a list for that and then so I didn't indicate that it needed to be a library when I first you know gave it that verbiage so then it's going to have you know who are the approvers going to be it's going to ask me to fill all this in and then it kind of did the same thing where it created a condition and this is the cool part is that it says if it's approved so I still have to fill this in too I would have to say if my um I'd have to go point to the approval action is equal to approve so you pretty much when you build these you're pretty much going to have to fill in all these little boxes it or for the most part it's just giving you a good structure in place and so it's going to have the structure in place already but then you still have to know how to fill in what all the different missing pieces are like who the approvers are maybe and who like where the SharePoint site is where the list or library is and um like who the email needs to go to for all these so it's giving me a nice structure though so let's go try a different one I'm just going to exit out of that and I'll do another one subscribe it to design it and let's see um oh Steve says what happens when you edit an existing flow that you made the old way well let's let me show you that real quick because that's um here's some old this is uh these are some approvals that I did um some email some flows that I did a couple weeks ago Power Hour so I did not use the new modern interface I'll choose edit with Copilot and then oh it says AI powered editing can't be used for this flow yet oh okay so it's going to depend on what actions that you're using in your flow from what I from what I understand because I have opened up old flows and clicked edit with copilot and it worked fine um but yeah it's going to depend on what specific connectors that you're using in your flow so like this one's just an email let's see if it can be edited with copilot yeah so yeah so I would I mean you could try all of them you can try all the different ones but it's it's going to vary so what is that one I'm not going to dig into all these and see what actions they have but this one is my is a Power Hour form that I just said I was trying to automate the invitations that you get um inviting you to teams when you fill out the Power Hour form this is what I was attempting to do when I built this so it actually does put it in um in the new interface so that's pretty slick all right let's do another new one and we'll say um every month copy all files from a OneDrive folder to another OneDrive folder so it's going to give me actually different examples each time which I love because it gives me some great ideas create a new task and planner when a new response is received in forms when someone mentions me by email send me a message on teams that's interesting copy all SharePoint items from a list to another with a click of a button that's cool I like that one so it's gonna say um you're gonna have to tell it which list so when you click this button when you trigger the flow it's going to go get all the items in a certain SharePoint list and then for each of those items it's going to go create an item in another list so what you're going to need to have though in place before this will work is you need to have the two lists so you need to have you know a list of uh issues like an issue tracker list in one place in one site and then an issue tracker list with all the same fields in it in another site and have those in place and that way when you are pointing to where your sites are you'll be able to tell it fill these all in and tell it where to create the items but this is what it gives you it gives you this cool structure that it builds a structure for you and it tells you how this is going to be done it's just going to go get all the items and it's going to Loop through each item and then each item it comes to in the first list it's going to go create a new item in the second list so um yeah that's uh that's your answer to at least the structure get the structure in place I still think it's going to help for you all too when you start using copilot to have just a fundamental understanding of how to fill in these actions like what all these different fields mean and just the concepts of how a flow works and how um how to test it and and what all the little settings mean so it's still going to help to have that knowledge of kind of just that General basic flow knowledge so I don't think this is necessarily something to wear um somebody who's never seen any of this before would be able to just pick it up and start typing and creating flows but I feel like that's probably the direction they're going another thing that they Microsoft has announced is that um you're there they created a co-pilot plug-in so if you have the paid version of copile I think it's called I mean I'm sorry chat GPT so it's going to have a chat GPT plugin to this AI so it's going to be like one IAI talking to the other AI so you have the paid version of chat GPT watching because 4.0 is what it's called if you have that paid version it's like 20 a month then you're going to be able to have all kinds of connectors and plugins and one of the plugins add-ins that you have is going to give you the ability to have chat GPT talk to flow so you'll be able to use the verbiage like that I just used in here in chat GPT and describe what you want your flow to do and then have it actually create to go over to Microsoft power automate and generate that flow for you so it's probably I'm assuming it's probably kind of the same concept maybe we'll be able to cover that in another Power Hour just go try all that out but um as far as building these out it's going to be I recommend I think it's going to be a good idea for you to try just some of the suggestions that it that it gives you and just to kind of see what they do and how they work and then when you come up with like your own flow that you need to build be be pretty specific about the more specific you are about who things are going to and like how many levels of approvals and which connectors to use the more you specific you are the better of an outcome I think you're going to get so um what do you think Joel does anybody have any questions or do you have any questions um ideas cool well let me see my notes um oh I'll go ahead and show you a couple of other things in just in that interface so I'm going to go create another one have you done a good items one yet um yeah just the one that copies all the items from a SharePoint list to another it doesn't get items it didn't do you're right that's a great that's a great point we need it to do the get items to go get a specific subset of items what do you think yeah so um let's do that so um once a week um get all of the overdue um and incomplete tasks from a SharePoint list I know I didn't capitalize it right and um and send overdue send notification emails to the um Siamese task so this is where so what we're testing specifically what Joelle is talking about is the get items action and flow and the camel query so when you need to get a specific subset of items in a flow it's going to you're going to have to use that little special chemical query syntax and that's where we're really putting this to the test to see if it's going to go get just the ones that are overdue now I doubt it because let's see let's look at the um filter query this little interface is kind of weird yeah it's got nothing in it so first of all it doesn't know what my SharePoint site is so I'm not sure now that's another thing we could try is to actually go create the list and in the chat in the little description like actually give it the link to that SharePoint list um and then that's that's something we can try and then um see if it's smart enough to create this camel query for us knowing the list and knowing all the columns so we'll try that I I'm not very hopeful I don't think it's going to be able to do that but you know we always like towards the end of Power Hour the last 15 or 20 minutes we're always just kind of trying stuff that who knows what's going to happen that weren't things that weren't scripted so we'll go ahead and go to um this human resources site just it's just a site in this little test environment and I'll create a new list and I'm not even going to use one of these templates I'm just going to call it tasks and I'm just going to create just a couple of columns just to get it some functionality so that it'll have like a status and just a couple of things so I've got the title of the task I'll say who's it assigned to and personal group and then I'll say um task status and that will be a choice and I'll say in progress pleated there that's good that's enough and then um I think I think that's I mean for functionality oh it's gonna have a due date it's gonna have a due date so date time what else do I need for this quick functionality I think that's that's all I need is those few fields um I like actually when I create date fields in here um I've always found that flow uh works better with them with the time with the date time Fields if I choose include time it's just the uh for some reason the format of the way it structures the date time works better okay so now I have my task list on the human resources site I'll just go Um add an item at least just to have something in here I have to have at least something overdue too so let's do one that's in it's going to be an overdue task test overdue gonna be assigned to me um so it's in progress and the due date was like Monday so I'll just say okay that one's going to be overdue and now that we have the URL so let's go get the URL of this list Let's test it out and see if the flow is going to be able to do this so um I'm gonna I'm gonna see if I can just ask the question instead of starting over from scratch I'm going to say get the overdue pass from that are not completed from this task list and that's so I'm giving the actual URL to the task list no it doesn't understand that um I can try one more thing I can say from the task list called tasks on the human resources site so I don't know if it can go kind of like find that in SharePoint and go find what site and what list that would be I doubt it let's see oh what did it do it let's see um so it removed the action it updated okay so this is good so it actually went in to my flow and changed it it updated the action it's telling me that it updated it so I have to go check them out to see oh let's see look at that look at that though see it's it's close it did the camel query Joelle yes okay did the camel query all it's missing is it doesn't know the actual I need to give it the site it just doesn't know where the human resources site is it knows it's a site called Human Resources so I'll just go pick it here it I told it it was a list called task but it doesn't know you know the like the good of that list or anything so I'll go find tasks here it's the only list on that site and then look at that status not equal completed and due date is less than and then this isn't really complete right here this would have to be like I'd have to tell it like it's less than today or less than right now so also what is my status column called so it just guessed at the word status but and I just use the word status in my natural language here but in the actual list where's my where did my list go oh it's got that different icon um I named my column task status so I I in my little sort of um in my natural language I should have said task status but task status one word smashed together that is the like the system name it's interesting Joelle so I created this column task space status and it automatically put the system name as task status one word so that's that's slightly new I've never seen SharePoint do that where it just assumes and like takes the space out yeah that's cool yeah I've noticed that I noticed that recently too actually when I was looking on a list yeah okay so I have to put task status so but it created the Syntax for me so that's really cool because camel query syntax is really hard to do it's kind of complicated so that's really good to know now that I can just use AI to help me generate this camel query so due date I think is the correct um let's see due date yeah one word due date um so that's correct correct and then I need to see a due date is less than and it just doesn't know what to put here so I can actually use this little function thing and I'll say UTC now UTC now is just one way that I can say there are lots of ways you can do it that I can say refer to basically now but yeah it created that whole Syntax for me so and not only did it create the right syntax but it actually updated existing items in the flow I didn't even tell it to do that I just was gonna I was thinking it might add a new action but it knew that I was um probably trying to correct what the flow was doing already and then it's saying for each and then I can look at what it's looping through it's going to be for each task and then it's going to send an email look at that Joelle it put the assign to in here it actually did that it actually put the right person so subject overdue task it didn't put like the name of the task or anything but um it filled all this in for me so let's go try and run this so I'm saving it um oh another thing just real quick before I exit out of this interface um oh oh okay for each assigned to oh it's confused about the mess the assigned to so it tried to fill in the assigned to but it didn't quite get it right so let me get that assigned to email there we go um another thing while we're in here that I want to mention is that you can ask it questions just like technical questions about flow so I noticed that there's a new action with approvals and it's a to approve um it's basically called like approved text and I said well maybe I'll just ask copilot what this new action is and why I would use it so I'll say what is the approval action called approve text used for all right so proof text is a feature used to approve or reject text-based content such as blog posts articles or other written content it's typically used by editors or content managers to ensure that the content meets the standards of the organization so that's a fairly new action and now Microsoft has given me an example of what I would use that for because you know you kind of see it listed in there and you're not really sure why it's there what the purpose of it is for what some examples are so there's my sort of documentation so you can ask it not only questions about your own flow the flow that you're in you can ask it questions about power automate and flow in general and just like help you know help questions for Stuff okay let's go try and run this so I will run is there so many things I want to try in here I want to try like putting input parameters I want to try like all kinds of different connectors and I really definitely want to I use flow all the time I'm building flows for my customers and things and I want to go and try and like make a habit of going in here and using natural language to get it to edit my flows and and add things and create flows so I like at least at least start that way and see what happens so this failed let's go see what happened that doesn't surprise me since they're probably there's probably something that I missed in here task status not okay my query failed so notice that it's in like the old interface here and so that's something to note is that when I click down here to open the flow up it puts me in the old interface so I need to go click edit with copilot to go back into the new one any other last questions I'm going to go ahead and probably wrap up a couple minutes early um status not equal completed and due date less than UTC now so I'd have to I'd have to go in here and troubleshoot like specifically what um what that error is what I noticed is that this new interface doesn't really have um that much about the error in it so let's go try like if I go try testing this just in here it doesn't give you that rich interface like giving you all the data about what the error was so I'll go test this and run it and see see it says flow run failed um so it doesn't like it doesn't have really this is just the code view this is it doesn't really it doesn't have the error it just says that it failed so I think you do have to go to the old interface to go like troubleshoot but it's telling me basically that my get items action is not um it's not formatted correctly I'm not going to worry about that right now I'm not gonna spend any more time like fiddling with the get items action and in the camel query but um I'm sure it's just like a misspelling or something like that like I misspelled a column name or something all right well let me wrap it up here go back to this home page okay well thanks for Joelle for coming and helping me with like getting getting feedback and thinking of things ahead of time that was it's been kind of fun doing this one um all right so oh yeah you're right maybe Chris I probably need single quotes around that date yep you're totally right this probably was missing so yeah I'm not gonna go back in there and do that but yeah you're right um good catch thanks everybody for watching um I encourage you to try out co-pilot it is in preview and when you go to the home page of make.powerautomate.com that's where you'll see this interface right here on my screen and that's where you can just um I encourage you to try out some of those examples and try editing your existing flows with the copilot interface and um thanks everybody for watching and for all your great questions see you next time Wednesdays at 11 Central

Channel: Laura Rogers, Microsoft MVP

Views: 6,338

Keywords: Microsoft 365, Microsoft, Power Hour, SharePoint, Copilot, Power Automate, Flows, Power Platform

Id: z4AtHnAS7YI

Length: 51min 57sec (3117 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2023