Today we're going to take
a look at automating tasks, specially boring tasks
with Power Automate. Now you can also use Power
Automate to generate reports that help you be more productive, kind of like having your
own personal assistant to take care of stuff
you don't want to do. Now, if this is the first time you hear about Power Automate, don't worry. We're going to go step by step. I'll do two types of automation so you get a good idea about
the power of this tool. One is to automate the creation of multiple Word files to PDF. And we're going to copy
these from one folder to another folder. And the other is to get an
email that's automatically triggered at a certain time, and that email is going
to have the lists of tasks that still need to be done. Let's get started. (upbeat music) To use Power Automate, login
to your office.com account, browse the apps here,
and go to Power Automate. Now, if you don't see it in this list, click on all apps, find it, click on it and you're going to be
taken to the homepage. Here you're going to
find lots of information and help on how you
can use Power Automate. Now, the great thing
about this tool is that it doesn't just connect to Microsoft apps, but to probably all third-party apps that you're currently using. Because check this out,
there are over 450 services that you can connect to. So for example, if you
want to collect tweets with a specific hashtag, you can create an automation that copies those tweets to an Excel file. You don't have to manually go and search those tweets
and copy and paste. This whole tool can do it for you. And if you're wondering,
how would you create this? Well, that's where templates come in. There are so many templates available here that you can use as your starting point, and then you can tweak it to your needs. Now for our two examples, I'll be creating the first
automation from scratch. And the second one will
be based on a template. To create your automation, go to create. First you get to decide
on what's going to trigger that automation or that
flow as it's also called. Do you want your automation
to be triggered by an event? So for example, when
you're assigned a task or a file is modified. Or do you want that automation to occur whenever you want? Here you're going to trigger it manually. You can use the Power Automate
mobile app to do this, or do you want your
automation to be scheduled? Is this something that's going to run on the first day of the
month or every hour? Depending on your environment, you can also create a desktop flow and a business process flow. Now, in our first example we're going to automate the creation of PDF files from Word files. And we're going to copy from
our OneDrive into SharePoint. I'm going to create this from scratch by creating an automated cloud flow, because the trigger of this
flow is going to be the creation of the file, so whenever
a new file is created in our OneDrive, this automation
is going to be triggered. So to create this, just click on it, and give this flow a name. I'm going to call my flow create PDF. Next I have to choose the flow's trigger. So this is the event
that's going to trigger the whole automation. So I can either search
for the event itself, or I can search for the app and then see what triggers
are available for that app. In this example, because
I want to save files or create files in my OneDrive
and then save them as PDF, I'm going to search for what triggers are available for OneDrive. I have when a file is deleted, when a file is created, when it's modified and so on. But here you have to be careful. Are we talking about personal OneDrive or OneDrive for Business? In this case I'm using
OneDrive for Business. So I want when a file is created
on OneDrive for Business. Now take a look at the
information we have here. This operation triggers a flow when a new file is created in the folder. Files larger than 50 megabytes will be skipped and not returned. Files moved within OneDrive
are not considered new files. Okay, so keep this in mind
and let's create this trigger. What this event needs is the folder. So this is going to be the
folder where I want to save my Word files to that I
want converted into PDF. So to select our folder, just
click on this folder picker. When you click on the
name of the folder here, it's actually going to select it. If you want to go into the sub folders, click on the arrow on this side. The folder I want to use for my
Word files is called convert. So I'm going to select that. Under advanced options you can decide if you want to include sub folders or not. It's a no, I don't have any
sub folders in this case so I'm going to skip that. Now we have our trigger. Next we need our action. What do we want to happen? Well, we want to convert this
file into a PDF document. Now, again, we can either
search for the action itself, or search for the app and
see the different actions we have available. So my app is OneDrive for Business. Let's see what we can do here. We can create files. We can list files in a folder
and we can convert files. This is what I want. So let's select that. I need to select the file. Now here, if I go to the folder icon here and select a specific file, it's
always going to use that file. That's not what I want. I want it to figure out
which file was created and dynamically select that created file. This is where you click inside the box and you get the ability
to select dynamic content. So these are based on the trigger event. In the file box here we can
see once the unique identifier of the file and here we
can see the file identifier gives us just that. So let's select it. The target type is PDF. In case you want to change that, you can do that, but I'm
going to go with PDF. Now we have our trigger event. We have the conversion, but just converting to PDF isn't enough. I need to save this PDF version somewhere. So let's add a new step. And this is where you decide on, if you want to save it in
your OneDrive for Business or somewhere else. In this case I want to
save it on SharePoint. So I'm going to select the SharePoint app and take a look at the different actions that are available for me. So here I can copy files, copy folder. I can create a file. That's the one I want. This action needs a site address. So let's click on the dropdown and we're going to see the site
addresses that were a part of. I'm going to select that, then to folders to
which we have access to. I'll go with my documents. And I've already created a folder in which I want to save my PDF files in. It's called PDF created. Let's select that. What's the file name? Well, this isn't going to be fixed. It's going to be dynamic. I want it to be the same
as the original Word file, so I'm going to select
dynamic content file name. For file content, I want
that to be dynamic as well. Let's go with file content. In case so now we have our trigger. We converted the file and
we're going to save it on the SharePoint drive. But let's do one more thing. Let's also send a team
message to a channel once these files are converted, so that everyone knows this task was done. So let's add a new step. This time let's search for
Teams, Microsoft Teams, and take a look at the
different actions we have. Here's post the message. Let's go with this one. Add the team ID. Click on the drop down, and you're going to see the
different teams you're a part of. I'll go with the finance team. The channel I want to post my message to. I'm going to select project. Now let's type a message here. I'll put converted to PDF, but it's going to be nice to know which file was just converted to PDF. So here we can use
dynamic content as well. Name here gives me the name of the file or folder from SharePoint, so I'm going to go with that. And that's my message. Let's click on save. It tells me your flow is ready to go. We recommend you test it. Now you can test it here
by running this manually, but let's just trigger this
by actually creating files in our OneDrive. So let's get out of this flow. So I'm going to go back
to the overview page. This is the details and the
run history of the flow. So the moment our flow
runs, we can see it here, and we're going to be able to see if it was successful or if it failed. Okay, so this is the convert
folder in my OneDrive. It's currently empty. I'm going to bring in two Word documents that are currently saved
in my downloads folder on the hard drive here. So let's take this one and this one. I'm going to copy them and bring them in my OneDrive and drop them in my convert folders, so Control+V. This should trigger the automation. Let's go to our flow and
see if it's picked it up. I'm just going to refresh this page. I can see I had two runs
here, both were successful. And when I click on these, I can see the duration
of each of these actions. Now was this really saved on SharePoint? Let's go and take a look. That's the PDF created
folder on SharePoint, and both files were
successfully converted into PDF. What about our Teams message? Let's open up Teams. Go to project and I can see that the Contract East.pdf
was converted to PDF. My messages were also successfully posted. Okay, so in this case we successfully created an
automation from scratch. Now let's take a look at
creating an automation from a template. To create a flow from a template, go to create, scroll down, and you can search for a template here. You can also go to templates and search for templates from here. So let's say the template that
you want has something to do with Planner and Outlook. I'm just going to type these in, press enter to see the
different options I have. I can create a task in Planner based on an Outlook calendar event. I can create tasks in Planner
for new Outlook tasks, or I can send a digest email of all outstanding Planner tasks. As you can see, you have
a lot of options here. In this example, I want to go with this because at the start of the
week, I'd like to get a list of all tasks that haven't
been completed yet in Planner and are assigned to me. So let's select this one. Here we get to see the
different apps that are involved and what our trigger is. So in this case, the
trigger isn't an event, it's based on a schedule. If I scroll down, we can
see the different apps that we need to connect to. I'm already connected to them. So let's go with continue. The entire process is
already set up for us. Let's quickly take a look
at what's happening here. So first we have our trigger. It currently runs at nine
on Monday, every week. Let's edit this and see the
different options we have. I can change frequency, instead of week go with months, day, hour and so on. In this case, I'm going to leave it as is. What I want is to update the time. So let's say instead of nine,
I want it to run at eight. Let's go to advanced options. This is the hour selection here. Click on the dropdown, scroll down, press the check mark
for eight, uncheck nine. And I have this part updated. Next action is to get a list
of my tasks from Planner, and then it filters the
list and picks up the tasks where the percentage is
completion isn't equal to, here it's using a functions. Instead of dynamic content we also have access to expressions. This is the expression that's used. So it makes sure that the task isn't a hundred percent completed. So it's only including
the tasks that are open. Next it makes a selection
for the different categories that we need. It extracts the title,
the percent complete and the due date. If you need anything
extra, you can add it. You have access to all
this dynamic content. You can add the created
daytime if you want. And you can also remove
things you don't want by just clicking on the x here. Once it extracts what it needs,
it creates an HTML table. Then it gets your profile
information for office.com so they can send you an email. This is the subject of the email and this is going to be your HTML table. Then you can add stuff
to this as you want. I'm just going to update the
subject to tasks I need to do. The name of this flow is here. It was taken directly from the template, but you can adjust this as well. Just click inside and update it. That's it, this flow is done. I'm going to save it. Now it's a good time to test our flow to make sure it works. So let's go to tests and
manually trigger the flow. Click on tests and run the flow. The flow has started successfully. Click on done and let's
wait for the email. It's right here. Tasks I need to do. And here is the HTML
table of my Planner tasks that are ascending and their due dates. It's much easier to create
a flow from a template. So as you can see, there
is a lot you can do with Power Automate. And something important to mention is that Power Automate is
available in the free version of Microsoft 365, but the
tests that you can automate there are limited. Now I'm really excited about this tool. So as I'm testing this out
and learning more about it, I'll post videos here. If you have suggestions
for videos or automations you'd like to see, comment
below and let me know and I'm going to see what I can do. As always, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video. (upbeat music)
