How to use Microsoft Power Automate - Tutorial for Beginners

hi everyone my name is Kevin today I want to show you how you can use Microsoft power automate and before you run off because it sounds like a complicated name stick around because with power automate you can simplify your life and then cut down on the number of manual tasks that you do in your life as full disclosure Before we jump into this I work at Microsoft as a full time employee so to make it real let me give an example so I run this YouTube channel here and just about every day I upload a video to YouTube now not only do I upload a video to YouTube I also then post about that video on Twitter so that's a manual task that I have to do every single day with power automate what I could do is power automate will look at YouTube see that I uploaded a new video and then it'll automatically tweet on Twitter on my behalf so it simplifies and cuts out one of the manual tasks that I had been doing and best of all it requires no coding knowledge at all anyone could jump in create an automation task and then have power automate work on your behalf and I'll show you step by step how you can do that if you've ever heard of if this then that or ifttt.com it's similar to that but it also has some more advanced functionality now today I'm going to show you how you can use the free consumer version of it there is also a premium version that you could use with work or school accounts that cost some additional money but I'm going to show you how you can use the free one and it offers tons and tons of functionality that can really help make your life easier alright well enough talk why don't we jump on the PC and I'll show you how first off you can get started with power automate Here I am on my PC and to get to power automate let's head to the website office.com once you land on office comm go ahead and click on the sign-in button this will bring us to the sign-in page if you already have a Microsoft account you could go ahead and type it in here if you don't yet have an account don't worry you could create one and it won't cost you anything it's free to create an account and could do that right here once you either sign in or you create an account and then sign in you'll land on the authenticated version of office.com now some of the things that you can do on office com not only can you get to power automate but you also have all of these other productivity tools for instance you get Outlook for email you get free cloud storage with onedrive you also get the well known productivity tools Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote amongst others one thing you might notice is there is no power automate as part of this initial set to get there we're gonna click on all apps this brings up the all apps screen and here too you might notice that there is no power automate previously power automate was known as flow and currently the it still refers to flow so we're gonna use this to launch power automate now if you're in any other app throughout the Microsoft 365 ecosystem so let's say you're an Outlook or maybe you're in Word and you want to get to power automate you can also get there through the app launcher or what I like to refer to as the waffle because it kind of looks like a waffle here you could click on that that'll launch up the default set of apps and here too I could also click on all apps and then here you'll see flow right here so either way will get you to power automate so let's go ahead and click on that and this drops us on the home page here we are on the power automate home page and let's take a moment to look at what's on the home page here at the very top you'll see that there are a few sample automations that you can try out down below that you also see some featured template collections so these are groups of templates relating to different areas and then you also see a sampling of different services that you could run automations on now to really make it real I want to go back to the example that I shared at the beginning so I have this YouTube channel and every time I post a video I want a tweet to go on Twitter that announces the video so let's see if power automate can help me with this and so the easiest way to get started is in the search box up here I'm gonna type in YouTube because this is the app where I'm going to post the video and I want to see if there are existing automations that I could simply use so I'm gonna go ahead and let me put in YouTube right here and then I'm gonna search once I search for YouTube one thing that I see is these are all of the different automations that already exist related to YouTube so what I could do is I could go through these different cards and see all what I can do or what others have already created now the nice thing about power automate and sharing these existing automations is chances are what I'm looking to automate other people have also thought about automating in which case it really makes it easy for me because I could simply reuse what others have done and in fact on that topic right up here in the top left hand corner I see an automation that already exists that says share a YouTube video on Twitter that sounds like what I want to do so let me click on that and let's try this out so here if I look at more of the details here it says when you upload to YouTube share your video via Twitter you can customize your tweet message well that sounds exactly like what I want to do that's great and down here it says this flow will connect to both YouTube and Twitter now one of the things that you need to do is as you connect to these different services you need to sign in to these different services and I've actually already gone ahead and done that but I signed into YouTube typed in my username my password and I also signed in to Twitter typed in my username and password and the little green check mark indicates that it's a valid connection next I'm going to click on continue on the next page I see a visual showing me what's going to happen it says when I upload a video so that's the trigger then down below I see what the action is it's going to post a tweet and here I could modify what the tweet text is it says check out this new YouTube video I uploaded and then it inserts a link to the video if I click into the text box I see some other dynamic content that I could also include as part of the tweet so in this case I already have the web link included but if I wanted to I could also include the videos title the description the title of my channel so lots of different types of content that I can pull in one thing I could even do is let's say that when I upload to YouTube not only I wanted to post a tweet but maybe I want to have it send out an email to certain people or maybe I wanted to also post a Facebook I could go ahead and I could also add additional steps but in this case I'm satisfied just posting a tweet on Twitter so I'm going to go ahead and click on save congratulations the new flow has been created and you just created your very first flow now to go see all the flows that I have over on the left hand side I could click on my flows and when I do that I'll see a list view of all of the different flows that I have now in this case I just have one shown up here one of the things I could do is I can click on this and this will bring me to a summary view of my new flow here I could see things like my 28-day run history so every time it runs I'll see a record of that I can verify that my connections are still working and some of the things I could also do is let's say I could I want to delete the flow because I no longer need it I could do that I could even turn it on or off so let's say I want to take a little break from Twitter I could turn this off and it'll no longer run in this example I showed you how you could create a new flow from a template I also want to show you how you could create a new flow from scratch and to do that we're gonna work our way down on the left-hand side here and next I want to click on create within the create view I have a few different options I can start from blank so start a new flow from scratch and in a moment we're gonna walk through what each of these options does and I'll show some examples down below and this is something we just did we started from a template this is by far the easiest way to create a new flow and down at the bottom you can also start a new flow from a service or an app or what's called a connector and you could start from there so let's go back up to the top and I'm gonna walk through some of the different ways you can start a new flow the first way is an automated flow and this is what we just did with YouTube that's called an automated flow essentially what that means is any time some some trigger occurs so in this case I upload a video to YouTube flow will take some action based on that in which case it tweets to Twitter so why don't we jump in and I'll show how you could also start off with just a blank automated flow so if I click on this I can name it and maybe I'm going to call this YouTube to Twitter so I'll show you how I could also start this just from scratch and here it says well what is your trigger in my case it's on YouTube so I'm going to search for YouTube and then you see the different triggers that are available so when a video is uploaded by a channel when I upload a video or when a new video matches a search so there are few different triggers that I can use in this case I want to go with when I upload a video so I'm gonna create the same flow as what I did before and then I'll click on create now here because it's not a template it doesn't have the Twitter step but I could go ahead and click on new step and within here I could search connectors and in this case I want to connect to Twitter so I'm going to type in Twitter and here I see Twitter is one of the connectors so I'm gonna go ahead and click on that and now when I upload a video I could take a variety of different actions in this case I want to post a tweet so I'm gonna click on that here I could type in text and then similar to before I could also add dynamic content so maybe I want to put in the video link and then at this point I could go ahead and save this and just like before now if I click into my flows I'll see now that I have two flows set up so that's how I could have set that one up manually now let me go back to create I want to show an example of an instant flow with an instant flow I need to manually trigger the flow so let's say by clicking on a button and then that'll kick off a flow now this compares to the previous example where it was an automated flow where I upload a video and then the flow automatically runs because power automate detects that trigger so in this case one of the things is sometimes my wife will come by and she'll ask me to say take out the trash or do something else around the house but I might be in the middle of doing something in which case I forget to do that task and then I get in trouble later so it might be nice to have a button that I could click on and then it'll remind me and say ten minutes to take care of whatever that task was so in this case I'm gonna simply add a flow button for mobile and by clicking on this button that will trigger the flow let me go ahead and click on create and here so that's the true I click on a button and now I could add a new step and maybe what I want to do is I want to let's say delay the message for let's say 10 minutes and so I'm going to type in delay and here I see a connector called schedule so let me click on that and here schedule has an option to delay let me click on that and now I could specify how long I want the delay to be so maybe I'll say 10 minutes that should be enough time and the unit is minutes and now let me add an additional step because it's gonna first off I trigger it then it waits for 10 minutes and what I want to have happen then is maybe I want to get a notification so I'm going to click on notification and here I could either get an email or a mobile notification I think a notification just a mobile notification is probably good enough to remind me and I'll click on that and now I can type in the notification message so maybe I'll say follow up on what the wife asked about and that should remind me what my task is and now I'm all done so I'm going to go ahead and click on save and I now have another flow and once again if I click on my flows here I can see that I now have this flow and it's currently active let me go back to create and I want to show how we can create a scheduled flow and just like the name implies I could schedule a flow to happen at a certain time or a certain interval now one of the things is every year my mom's birthday comes around and I hate forgetting that it's her birthday that doesn't look too good when I forget so here I'm gonna call the flow birthday and what I could do is my mom's birthday is on April 30th so I'm going to select April 30th and maybe we'll do it at noon so right in the afternoon and what I could do then is maybe I'll repeat every let's say 12 months so basically every year this flow will run so now let me go ahead and create it now this type of flow is great let's say you work as an admin and every month you need people to submit their expense report you could have it automatically send out an email every month so you no longer have to remember to do that on your own so here I set up the recurrence and I'll click on add a new step and here I could click on mail and send an email notification is the action so the recurrence that's the trigger the timing and then the action is some to send an email and here in this case let's see I'll just type in an email address pretend this was my mom's email address so I could type that in and then I could say happy birthday mom and let me put in some text in the body and here I could say I love you so much down below I can also show Advanced Options and here I could add additional people on the CCE line or the BCC line so maybe if I have some siblings and I want to make them jealous that I remembered it was my mom's birthday but maybe they didn't remember I could BCC them just to let them know that I emailed mom and maybe give them a heads up that maybe they should do the same so all of this looks good let me go ahead and save this flow now and once again I'll click into my flows and here you can see that I have my birthday flow set up I also have my wife reminder flow and I have my YouTube flow set up one of the things you'll notice is my life is getting simpler I feel less weight on my shoulder as I add these flows because I no longer have to remember these things I no longer have to do these things it's really making my life easier I'm gonna click back into create now there are two more flows here these are premium flows where you either need a work or school account to be able to take advantage of them I'm not going to go through and demo these today but I want to say a quick word about what you can do with these so with a UI flow this is a new feature or functionality that recently came out for power automate what it allows you to do is you could click through a website you could click through an app and you could create automations based on them so one way to think of it is it's like making a macro but in any application or on any website so just to give an example of what you could do with that let's say that you have a whole bunch of docs in Microsoft Word and you want to save them all as PDFs you can use the UI flow recorder to record opening a doc and then saving a doc as a PDF and then you could apply that to any number of documents so with this it greatly simplifies flows and it makes it really easy all you have to be able to do is click through the interphase and then you can automate a flow then lastly there's another one called the business process flow and this allows you to set up steps that a human will walk through and they won't see the remaining steps until they've completed the initial set of steps that they have so you can also use that it's more of a business scenario so today we're not going to go into that that's an overview of how you could start a new power automation or new flow from blank I also have some templates down below and I see some connectors but I'm gonna click into the full view so we could see what's possible when I click into templates this shows me all of the different templates that other people have already created now this will probably take care of much of your automation needs and here I can search for templates what's nice is it's sorted by popularity so by default I could see what most other people use and the ones at the beginning are pretty compelling and maybe automations that I also want to take advantage of now not only can I look by templates I'm going to click on connectors here on the left hand side and these are all the different services and apps and that I could create automations on and earlier from what I remember I think they said there was something like 354 and by the time you're watching this video they'll probably be even more but this is a nice way I could set up automations between apps alright well that was a quick tutorial of how you could use power automate to simplify your life if you feel like you might be able to automate part of the manual tasks that you do in your life please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see more videos like this in the future hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out and lastly if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future leave a comment down below and I'll add it to my list of videos to create alright well thanks a lot for watching and I hope to see you next time bye

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 465,725

Rating: 4.9404988 out of 5

Keywords: kevin stratvert, flow, microsoft, microsoft power automate, power automate, automation, ifttt.com, ifttt, if this then that, tasks, task, steps, step, manual, office, office.com, power, automate, template, templates, flows, microsoft flow, automated, schedule, scheduled, instant, ui flow, business process, process, business, connectors, connector, trigger, action, event, rpa, robotic process automation, platform

Id: dDO4Y4aDYXw

Length: 17min 23sec (1043 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2020