Microsoft Lists and Power Automate

what's up everybody welcome back john leveck here senior platform evangelist for the power platform and wow it has been a while since we've done a video just us hasn't it i feel like i've for months and months and months on end i've had guests i've had community community members and mvps been trying to share the stage and give people an opportunity to be known and show their stuff but today we're back to just you and me and what are we talking about we are going to show you the brand new microsoft lists if you're not familiar with lists get ready you're in for a crash course okay so the first thing we want to do is we want to discuss our use case why are we going to use a microsoft list what are we going to do with it what's its purpose and so right here in front of me i have this email and you can see it says how to use flow properties to get the word out i'm going to go ahead and highlight that right here how to use flow properties to get the word out now this is a email that i used to have to send to people probably three to ten times a month and you know i could have a word document ready where this was ready to go and copy and paste it or i could save it as an eml file and attach it and send it to people but i decided you know what i wanted it to feel a little bit more personal an automation that feels personal yeah that's a good goal right so anyways what did i do i went ahead and i put together a guide telling people who are looking to build power automate connectors how to use our various community properties to go ahead and extend their reach to get in front of more of your eyes right they want to know okay i built this connector how do i get people to use it and in my realm this is what i told them i said the first thing you should do is you should make templates templates are going to make it easy for other people to use your connector i then tell them to go get registered in the community and start writing on the community blog do a how-to do a welcome introduce people to your service anyways i go on here to tell them additional steps on how they can gain access to some of our properties and if they continue to be a good steward and interact with our community i give them access to the big blog which is awesome because it has over a hundred thousand monthly viewers it's a big bonus for people so anyways this is something that i would have to do all the time because the connector team would send people to me i would then send this email out all the time and so instead of that i created a new business process i said i'm going to power automate this i'm going to build some flows i'm going to make this work for me instead of me working for it so let's go ahead and jump in and look at what this process looks like so the first thing is instead of the the connector team sending someone to me they go ahead and send them here to the microsoft flow community outreach request form it's four fields company name first name last name email address that's it so when you fill out those four things after you build your connector you then will get this email automatically pretty cool right so now that just takes out a whole bunch of work that i have to do but even cooler than that i've built in a little bit of a delay here so that after 15 days i follow up and i say hey how's it going do you need anything additional are you working the properties out yourself i'll show you that a little bit in the flow but let's go ahead and jump into how this all comes together so first thing we want to look at here is microsoft lists this should be rolled out for everyone by now i'm i'm hearing that everybody should be having this and if you don't it should be coming shortly to your tenant so rest assured it will be there soon but it's pretty simple you can do a couple of things here right there's a couple lists that i have uh you know and you can see here my partner onboarding list we're going to look at that in a second but let's just go ahead and take a look at what the new list experience looks like real quick so that you can see what it's like for you to build one so you've got a couple options here you can actually build one from blank you can build one from an excel file or you can go ahead and choose one of these nifty templates that they have this is a cool one content scheduler i mean it's uh it's pretty funny i was in a meeting the other day and people were talking about oh how do we want to run our editorial calendar well here you go sharepoint uh microsoft lists they have a content scheduler list template ready to go for you let's actually just go ahead and click into that one real quick and check it out so it looks like it's going to provide some default columns here content title description author status draft due date published by content type images links and then files pretty cool let's just go ahead and use it and see what it does so content scheduler what's it about uh let's say john videos we'll choose an icon a calendar is good we'll save it to my list awesome we'll hit create let's see what happens wow look at that what a nifty thing so it just went ahead and made that whole list for me okay pretty pretty cool and now if i wanted to go ahead and add to that i would just simply come over here to this right side and click on add column and then i could go ahead and add additional things so i could go ahead and put another single line of text here that says published right and then boom we see another column get added okay simple as that so now now that we know how simple it is to make a list let's go ahead and just check out my list that i've created to manage this partner onboarding process so first thing you're going to notice is there are four contact fields here okay and company title contact email first name last name those are the four fields that i asked for in the form right over here in the form company name first name last name email company name email first name last name boom okay now i also have something else the date they are added the date that they're added to the list gets put here and then there's also this follow-up date but if you notice there's no date columns here inside of my form and so those have to get added somewhere right so now now that we see all of our columns here and these are just all text by the way uh company title contact email first name last name all single line of text day added and follow-up date also single line of text now why did i use single line of text instead of date fields or email fields i'm going to be honest it's because power automate likes to use strings it passes strings very easily it can interpret those numbers without you saying this is a date if you just pass it as a string it's actually going to save you a lot of heartache in the long run instead of having to set up additional steps you just pass that string value and it's going to work okay so with that said let's go ahead and jump in here this solution takes two flows to do you could do it in one i like to do it in two i like to break up my flows into compartmentalized pieces so that way i can manage each part of the process much more easily and efficiently rather than having a whole lot of dependencies downline that i have to you know manage every time i make a change and so this way if i compartmentalize my flow into separate pieces if i need to make a change to the first piece easy and if i need to make a change to the second piece easy so flow number one what does it do it starts with the trigger when a new response is submitted this trigger gives you one option you have one drop down and you can choose the name of one of your forms this one is called the microsoft flow community outreach request form we saw that here your title in the top it's going to basically match what you're searching inside of your flow here now i then go ahead and click this little plus sign and add an action that action is get response details now when i do that when i choose that step get response details what's going to happen is this apply to each is going to appear it's going to drop this get response details down inside of it and it's going to move this list of responses into your output value here for your apply to each so basically what it's doing is it's saying get all of the details for each response so we go ahead and say when a response is submitted get all the details for each response and then from there we then choose the plus add an action i'm gonna go ahead and just do it here and we type in create item okay and then we'll see right here create item sharepoint now is that a little bit confusing a little bit right because this is called microsoft lists and then over here we're looking at sharepoint well sharepoint is what's behind microsoft lists before it was microsoft list it was a sharepoint list and so right now the way we interact with the microsoft list is the same way that we would interact with a sharepoint list and so we choose create item we choose create item sharepoint right here and then that's going to go ahead and give us our same fields we have here where we choose our site address we choose the name of the list right so here's our site address here's our list name and then what we can start to do is we can actually go ahead and start dropping items in here so this is all the dynamic content that's what this stuff is called and so we'll add that by going ahead and putting your company name right there right and then this one is contact email so when we click inside of there it's your email address and then first name your first name last name your last name okay and you'll notice date added and follow-up date those still stay blank right now we're gonna take care of that in the next flow okay and so we're done with this flow this one is ready to save and then ready to go okay so what's going to happen is a response gets submitted to the form we go ahead and get all the details what's their name what's their company what's their email we then take all that information i'm going to go ahead and delete that because we don't need that anymore i then go ahead and take all that information and create a sharepoint list item with that info so now the flow takes the information from the form and puts it into the sharepoint list okay so let's go ahead and actually just look at that in action here and so uh let me click on preview and then john 2 so we can see a fresh one here because i've tested this before levec2 oh wait a second jl media and then john two levek two email address j-o-l-e-v-e-s-q at microsoft.com and we submit and i want to send personal data okay now let's go ahead over to our list and we can refresh and go all the way to the bottom and check it out jl media my email address john 2 levesque ii perfect that's exactly what we wanted to happen our flow is working it's taking data from the form it's moving into the list step one complete okay now this is where the cool stuff happens in flow number two so in flow number two we have a new trigger that trigger is when an item is created where in sharepoint why because sharepoint list is what is underneath microsoft list so when an item is created in sharepoint that's our trigger so you can see here we go ahead and connect to that same site that same list right if we come over here to our first flow same site same list where we're dropping the info now when info gets added there right so now our first flow is going to trigger our second flow because we're adding info now we're going to do some fun stuff the first thing we do is we do plus add an action we add this action called compose compose is kind of like a a blank slate you can put anything you want in there and what i've done is i've put this little expression utc now open quotes close quotes what this does is just grabs your current time in the utc time format and that's important to know because power automate only operates in the utc time format and so if you're trying to translate between your time and it you're probably going to have a bad time you always want to make sure that you're converting time to your to to utc and then operating in that or converting to your time and only operating in that trying to operate in both is just going to cause you heartache okay so now what do i do with the current time i convert utc time to my time and so i want the short date pattern i want to go from utc to pst where i am okay and so i take the output of the compose as my base time because remember i grabbed utc now so i take that output and drop it here and and it's very simple to do all you have to do here is click into that field and click outputs right because you see compose right here so we want the outputs of the compose as our base time we then choose we can't we have a drop down here to choose things short date pattern from utc to pst okay first time thing done next part we're now going to create a 15-day counter because remember i talked about how after you you get the first email it's going to wait 15 days and then follow up this is how we're going to do that so again we drop into compose and now we're going to build a slight small tiny little expression here okay and what it is is we do add days open bracket body open bracket single quote convert time zone right from our action here single quote close bracket comma 15 close bracket so basically what we're saying is add 15 days to what the time we just converted okay so whatever our output is of this then now add 15 days to that okay and so now we have that 15 day counter right here in our compose just kind of chilling and so we'll leave that there for a second and then we're going to do two things we are going to update that sharepoint list item okay we're going to drop in converted time and then we're also going to drop in the follow-up date 15 days ahead and so again these are very easy to do right when we want day added we come down here we click converted time because we grabbed right now and we converted it to our time and so that's the converted time value and then our follow-up date is our converted time plus 15 days and so then we grab our 15-day counter output and boom now notice this says compose this says 15 day counter i did that on purpose because this would have said compose2 now if you want to know how to rename an action and you don't know how you just click the little ellipses and you click rename okay and so that one's 15 day counter and then we can actually just go ahead and rename this one too to current time okay and so now that step is called current time now here's the coolest parts so after we do all those updates we first send out the email okay and so by now if we go back to my email i probably should have gotten a nice email that says how to use the flow properties there it is hey there john two really glad to have jl media as part of the platform and then i start talking to myself as myself with all the links okay and so in the flow you can see i have line breaks i have link things it's all nice formatted html because the send an email action consumes all that html very nicely and so it's not a problem now on the other side the last thing i want to show you here is there is an action so in my i oh i'm sorry let me show you one more um you see here there's a split this is called a parallel branch and these are very easy to create to do this all you do is click on the plus sign in between steps or after steps and choose add a parallel branch and that will split your flow into these two runs that then give you concurrent actions and so right away the first thing i want to do is send that email to myself which already happened and so you can see that there and then the next thing i want to do is delay until 15 days from when the form was filled out to the minute right remember we added 15 days to the moment that they got added to the list so wait 15 days and send another email and so this one says hi again name i'm writing really quickly to check in and see how your progress is going while using our various flow properties have you run into any snags any ideas on how we can improve this process to add more value thanks again for building on the flow platform and so this is just a nice personal touch right this process used to be something that i used to have to manage very manually i would have to write the initial email i would have to mark in the calendar when i needed to follow up i would then have to write a follow-up email and deal with all that communication back and forth now half that process is automated with two flows and what maybe about 20 minutes together you too now can build a simple process like this build a microsoft list storage some data there build yourself some columns that help you manage things and then build some flows inside of power automate that help you simplify this process and and save yourself some time you know why because you should be focusing on higher higher value work okay that's it from me for today my friends if you have any questions go ahead and leave them below if you'd like to see any new videos or any specific topics upcoming go ahead and leave me a comment with what those are otherwise go ahead and click like click subscribe because you don't want to miss another video alright guys much love from me i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Jon Levesque

Views: 60,875

Rating: 4.9174852 out of 5

Keywords: jon levesque, jon levesque microsoft, microsoft lists, microsoft, office 365, work management, teamwork, microsoft 365, microsoft list, ms build 2020, microsoft 365 app, productivity apps, sharepoint list, microsoft lists app, microsoft lists in teams, microsoft lists first look, microsoft lists review, microsoft lists in sharepoint, power automate tutorial, power automate sharepoint list, power automate forms, power automate microsoft, power automate outlook

Id: inRfh8-klwk

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020