Microsoft Power Automate - Tutorial for Beginners 2021

my name is anna jensen let's learn about the hardest application in the office 365 universe and that is microsoft power ultimate it's very easy to learn and there's a high salary waiting for you if you do why well there's a huge demand for power automated developers it's low code so everyone can learn it just sit down and do it this example starts off very simple and then it gets more advanced i'll hold your hand throughout the exercise so simply just pause or stop the video if things goes too fast the video is designed for that if you have any questions post them below here in the comments i'll try to get back to each one of you or buy this power automate bible there's a link to it in the description below now let me go to my computer and it's very important that you open up power automate and do the exercises with me in that way you will learn the most instead of just passively watching go to office.com and then click sign in either up here in the right corner or at this red button if you have a microsoft account sign in otherwise create one it doesn't matter whether it's a business account or personal account a personal account is a bit limited that is we cannot use all the features from our professional account but it doesn't matter for this use case so just use a free one if that's the one you got so i click next then i paste in my password and i click sign in we can choose to stay signed in that will make it a bit easier for us if we use the app a lot this is the office 365 front page before we proceed let me present you the case i want to create a flow i open up the excel sheet this is from the course materials if you haven't downloaded go download it the link is in the description we want to create a flow that reads an excel sheet it could be placed either in sharepoint or onedrive and then we will check if our employees have birthday today if yes then we want to send an email also we will do logging and we will talk a lot about how we can manipulate strings so don't worry i will take your hand to the entire course here i have some data i have five columns i have id name email birthday and status the idea that is a unique value column one two three always when you work with data have some unique id because then we can refer back to it we will use this column later then we have a name i have stefan mess and tony that's the name of my employees those employees they have an email that one will go in here simply just type in your microsoft email i will paste in mine here the reason why i didn't did it do it and the data was that i didn't want to have emails from each one of you watching this guide so go ahead make your own then we will have a birthday let's say that we will have the birthday that these two guys have birthday today and this one here have some other birthday so today it's the september 27 2021. this one here i will copy and i will paste it in here and i know that this these guys can be born today but this is the example we will start with and then we'll go more advanced as the course proceeds here this guy can have 09 26 2021 like this so now we have filled in our table one thing that we will need to do is to format this table as a table to do this mark your range this is my range when i have marked this i press ctrl t then this pops up we specify that our table has headers because it does id name email birthday and status that is the headers of our table so i click ok now you can see that we have a nice table and we want to modify the name it's not super important but it looks nice at the moment we have a table name called table 2 or table 1 maybe now it disappears if you want to find it again simply just go into your table at any place go to the table design over here and you will have it up here i will call this birth days like this and i click enter so now this table is named birthday if i click back into it you can see that the table name is birthday we are done here we click save now we go back to the office.com that is the office 365 apps the apps that we are going to use that is outlook onedrive and power automate power automate is this arrow in case you don't see the apps don't worry simply just click the nine black dots up here click all apps and we will have the apps down here but let me go back so first i will open up outlook that is my emails we want to send an email whenever this employee has birthday or not then we want to open onedrive because we want to have our data here and we will create a folder for our data i created one called birthdays but you can call whatever you can call your folder whatever you want or you can place it in a subfolder anywhere else or at sharepoint for that matter i will open up my folder it's empty right now and let me show you this i want to move this over in onedrive what i do here is let me move this a bit i have it here even with a spelling arrow i simply just copy it over here the spelling error doesn't matter when you receive it i will make sure that the h is there so now we have our data in the centralized place that is run drive so we can read it with power automate we are ready to open up power automate and create the flow that will automatically send out emails based on people's birthday so i go down here to power automate again if you don't see it click the 9 black dots up here and click all apps but we see it so we click here this is the power ultimate front page what we can do is that we can create new flow we will do that so click create here it might look a little bit confusing all this but don't worry i will hold your hand and take you through the solution we will go through a lot of it a lot of the things here in power automate and the things that we don't go through in this video we will go through in the next videos so make sure to subscribe to the channel to learn all the nice things here in power automate and in parentheses upgrade your career so here we can choose between flows you can see that there's five flows here i have an automated cloud flow that is a trigger flow something happened that could be if we receive an email from a certain sender if something happened at sharepoint whatever whatever whatever then we do we start a flow we could also choose an instant cloudflow that is if we press a button the flow will run usually we will do that for attended office automation that is if our agent or ourself needs a flow to run then we will just press a button or we could schedule a flow this will be very clever if we have a birthday flow because then we could schedule our flow to run each day maybe at the morning at eight o'clock send out these messages finally we have a business process flow this is more complicated flow and with a lot of steps and we have our desktop flow the desktop flow that is the real rpa that can automate ui elements that is everything you see on your desktop it can click buttons you can data scrape it can type in in browsers everything i made a complete course on that you can just click the playlist up in the right corner to go to the desktop version but here we will use the web application i will recommend you to master both things both power automate web which is this course and the desktop thing so we click we create an instant cloudflow i click here we can give it a name i will call it birthdays and then we'll choose manually trigger our flow i click create now we created our first flow it will look like this it's blank so let's add steps to it this is the trigger up here so i click new step the first thing that we want to do is that we want to get each row of the excel sheet here at birthdays we want to get that so we can work with it so i'll search for excel here i can see i can have have one called excel online business i have one called excel online onedrive if you have a business account choose the one for business over here if you have a personal account choose the one called excel online onedrive i have a business account so i click here what do i want to do i want to read the data into a list so i choose the list rows present in a table if you can't see it simply just search for it up here i click it and then i need to fill in something i have a location document library file and table and now it's really really clever because power automate will do a lot of the things for you so click the drop down here click the run drive for business click the drop down here document library that's the one drive my file well you can see my folders here mine was placed in the birthday folder so i click the arrow over here and i choose my excel sheet or the book actually then i'll choose the table and that's why it was important that we format it as a table otherwise it wouldn't work so i'll choose birthdays here we can have some more advanced options we can choose to fill our data only have to work with data that we have applied some query on but we will not do it here that will be the more advanced course in case you want the more advanced course remember to subscribe to the channel to get all the new power automated courses that i will make so we got this in a table now we need to iterate through this list and to do that click a new step here we can go to control or we can search for a apply to each that is this one here what this does it will iterate through our list take the row one by one and do something here just click in here and in case this menu doesn't open it will look like this you can always find it by clicking add dynamic content here we can say list rows present in a table you can see we can find a lot of data what we want is the value of this list we can choose either the body or the value the value that is a subset of body and that is sufficient for our solution so choose the values here so inside the apply to each click add an action not a new step but add an action so now we will ask as we are going to each row of the excel sheet we want to ask hey is the birthday today so i'll find a condition search for it here here condition what this does is ask a question here this question always have two responses and exactly two responses it could either be a yes or no so a boolean if you know programming if you don't don't worry so i choose a value and i want to ask let me find my excel sheet again i know i open it a lot but i want you to understand it i want to ask is today's state is that equal to this one here if yes then we'll send an email and let's just repeat it we can see this is true and this is true and this is not true now i go back to power automate so i choose a value and again we have this dynamic content i will look at the birthday so i'll choose the birthday here is that equal to what value will that be equal to well that will be equal to this one here like this so we ask a question is the q and row is that the birthday is that equal to this one then we'll have a yes or no if yes then he or she will have a birthday today then we'll go over here if no we are in the no branch nothing will happen we won't send an email so here i click add an action because now we want to send the email and again this is the simple solution where we only look at today's date but today's year we will make it more advanced in a few minutes so here i'll search for outlook i will have an outlook.com or outlook 365. this is again the personal account and this is the business account i have the business account so i click here what do i want to do i want to send an email i can see it down here otherwise search for it so i click here now you will see it looks really like you're about to send an email in outlook i have a tool a subject a body and i have some more advanced options bcc cc attachment everything let's just hide them again so we have the simple solution so who do i want to send it to i want to send it to the email of the current row that is the row we are iterating through up here so i just click in here in case i don't see any dynamic content again click here and you'll see the email here or you can expand it by clicking see more you have all the data that you can use i will use the email so i click here this one will send an email we can have a subject so i'll say happy birthday write whatever you want then in the body let's write a nice message to the employee so i'll say hey and let's personalize it personalize it and write a name again if you don't see it click add dynamic content we will take the name click here enter enter a happy birthday there is a present for you at https.org forward slash birthday like this i mark it this is a link mark it as a link copy the link title and make the same in the target then i open the link in a new window and click add now there's a birthday present for each one of my employees that they can click this link so then i can say kind regards honest and by the way if you're curious there will be some goodies here that'll mainly be my linkedin and facebook group where we solve power automate problems together and network so that's fine we will stop here and we will save our flow because now let's try to run it so we saved it and we can click test we will test it manually so we click test here it's running here it will test whether or not we are signed into our connections we are we'll have the green check mark in case you don't then just fix it sign into excel and outlook then we click continue now i click run flow this will run manually i click done then i go back to power automate we can see our flow is running in a bit you'll see the flow running to each steps that's fine we are done here or let's check the data so if i go back to my outlook we can see that we have two emails hey steph hey tony if i open this hey stefan happy birthday there's a present for you hey tony that's a present for you well not the most elegant email but for this example it's fine and were this correct let me open the excel sheet again yes stefan and tony has birthday today but now let's add years to it because this was not very elegant we just say that each one of these employees were born today or yesterday so now let's make it a bit more advanced let's go to onedrive so i click the run drive and open the excel sheet so click here this one will open now let's have stefan the year he was born in should be 1975. mesh should be born he's a young gun he will be born in 2001 and tony he will be born in 1955. so again these two they are having birthday today and mess earth is not so we want to send birthday messages to stefan and tony and we want to lock a status so if we send a birthday message we want to have a status here saying send so this is a log message let me close down this one actually we don't have to close down this one we can easily work with it but for simplicity let me close it we will open it afterwards and see that we have updated it so now we go back to power automate it will get a little bit more tricky now not really anything advanced or anything but the people that say that this is a no code platform they lie there will be a little bit of code but you will learn it we will work through it together so then click edit up here in the right corner because now we want to let me open the excel sheet again we want to only look at the birthday and that is the the month and the day if i take this one here open it here that is the month and the day the year doesn't matter they have a birthday whether or not the month is this month and the day is today i know we fixed it in our run drive this is the local version but you'll get the intuition so we want to separate this and to do that we will work a little bit with expressions this is nice way to learn expressions so if i go back so here we will add another action so we want to compose a string so we take compose because we want to work a little bit with the data so i'll take the compose here and what we'll do here is that we'll move it up before the condition or actually we're moving the condition below this so drag it place it here we have our compose here so i click here i'll go over here to the dynamic content again i think you know the drill just do this and click birthday so what we do here is that we'll we'll see we hover over it because we will need this expression that is the items applied to each question mark hard brackets and birthday within because this one will refer to the dynamic item called birthday now we will need to do an expression so if i just remove this and go to the expression we will write out the entire expression what we will do here is that we will split out the birthday into three items that is the month day and year and then we will afterwards we will only use the day and month what we can do here is that we'll apply a string function you can see here the intelligence auto completion we'll have the split we will use that but i will write it out split then parentheses and now we will use our expression so i'll say items that was the one from before otherwise just rewind the video a bit by the way if you enjoy this learning if this helps you please like the video that will really help me a lot and my channel and i can make new videos for you so here we have the items then we'll have the single quotation marks we'll say apply to each like this then afterwards the first parentheses will have a question mark like this hard brackets like this in single brackets i know this is a bit tricky but just remind the video this was the expression from before so now we are done so we'll scroll outside the heart brackets make a comma and now we want to say what do how do we want to separate this because we have an expression and then we want to define we'll say we want this forward slash we want to separate it by this so we have three items that is the month day and year so go back here after the comma i'll say still in single quotation marks i'll just put a forward slash so now we have our expression press ok it will say that it's invalid that's fine it's an arrow now we have it here you can see it here split items apply to each question mark birthday and split by the forward slash now we want to get the current time because there's a difference between the current time at our local time zone and the time in power automate the time and power automate that is utc and right here we have utc plus i think plus two so we want to account for that so we don't mess up when we look for today's date we want to make sure that it's the local day that we're looking for we're not crossing over two days so click the plus here add an action i will say current now we can go to date time but that's fine current time if i search for that we will see this current time on the date time so click it here and nothing will really happen this will just take the q and time now we will take the current time of power automate and format it to the date of error or the time of our current time zone so again click this little plus i think this is very cool it might sound seems very advanced to do all these things but i'll get you through all the things in power automate so you just don't think it's just drag and drop but you'll actually learn a lot from this just rewind the video is designed for that so again click the plus here between cue and time and condition i click plus add an action so here i want to convert my time zone so as i convert like this i'll take the convert time zone so the base time that was the q and time that we got just got from here that is the q and power automate time again take notice so i'll say where is this source where is that coming from well that is utc because it's power automate time so i'll scroll a little bit down it will be right here at zero so between minus one and yeah zero utc take that one so we just specify what time this is in and we want to convert it to our local time zone so click the drop down here at the destination mine is copenhagen and it's plus one i told you that it was plus two i didn't know but you can find it here so find your city or your time zone and click here now just take the format string this one will specify what we will have out in our output i want only the month and day and in dot net i'll write two big m's forward slash dd two big m's that is month the small m er that is minutes by the way and then we have dates we don't need the year as we will only compare today's month and day with the things that we have in the excel sheet just click outside now we have what we want we need to fix the condition here though so i will delete this and we needed the birthday but we all we already did that up here in the compose we split it this one here to an array remember we split the birthday to an array so we have three items in our array array is just a list we have the month first we split it by the forward class then we have the days and then the year so if i go down here to condition then we go to expression we will write concat concat is simply just merging things together string elements together again please help me if you enjoy this guide give it a thumbs up this will really help my channel a lot so i'll say concat then a parenthesis now we need the output from the first item from up here so i'll write out puts did not say parentheses single quotation marks and this was called compose you can find it as we did before but let's just trust me so i'll say compose and then we won the first item in the array that was disarray to get that it's zero index so the first item is zero the second is one and so forth so i'll say hard brackets like this and i say zero so now we got the first one then we want to have the forward slash that was this one here we are comparing with that so that's just to make them standardized so i'll say comma then i'll take single quotation marks again and forward slash again we are concatenating these things so now we are concatenating the first item and the forward slash we just need to add the second item that was the month so i'll click here then i'll say comma and well we're alternating things here we don't want double work so just copy this one here copy it and paste it in after the comment and we want the second item oops let me go over here change this to one so now we got it we click ok it says that it's invalid that's fine it's not so we have it right now now we are comparing to the converted time zone so what do we need to do well let's open up the excel sheet again we just need to have a status and we can do this by just adding if we send an email we want to add a status we send the email based on the condition now we're only comparing month and days as opposed to before so i'll click add an action here i'll say excel and we'll choose the updater row so click that the location now we can go through each one of these steps again so click to drop down minus one drive for business the document library that is onedrive the file find it here what you will do in an enterprise setup you will have created variables for this in going or in going arguments even so you just change it once and then you can use them in your flows but for now it's very fine the table that was the birthdays table now we will use our key column and key value that was the idea so if i click down here i'll say what was my key column that is the idea then i need to specify the corresponding value so and that was the one i got from here in the apply to each that was the idea the dynamic content so go over here in dynamic content again you know the drill find the idea that's it what do i want to update i want to update the status because now i want to say send that is we have to send an email we update the status column so now we are done you have completed a quite complicated flow but we did it together let's see that it will actually work so i save it here then we'll test it so i'll test it manually i click test so we will run our birthdays flow manually let's run the flow let's click done and you'll see that we have going through each one of the steps in a few seconds here so this one will likely pass like here now we are done let's inspect our data and see that we have actually solved our case so if i go to mail two new messages has came that is stefan and tony so yeah we completed this step it would it now it looked at the data only the month and day and still find out that it needs to send out messages to these two let's see if we have updated our excel sheet here so if i go in here now we have a nice send let me scroll a little bit up we have send in the status case completed let's go back to power automate you learned how we can automate your excel your onedrive and your outlook in your flows we also saw how we can tune our flows with simple formulas this language is workflow definition language and i can i can recommend this book as it will take you through all these advanced steps there's a link in the description now let's say that you want to learn something here in power automate you can also cheat a bit click the templates here you have tons of templates what i did when i wanted to learn power automate i just took any one of these and then i just dissected so if if i for example just want to have this one here just click here that is the one drive you can send out notification when a new file is uploaded that is fine i need to sign in here i will do that and then the flow will come and we can learn a lot from that so i really recommend you to play around with the templates and don't forget to subscribe to this channel as i will make a lot of new power automated guides a lot of advanced guys and a lot of beginner guides and again this was not all we also had the power automate desktop remember if i go to create we had this desktop flow you can install it from up here in the right corner power automate desktop i made a complete course on that click the video to the left a more cool rpa tool that is the best rpa tool in the world the biggest the most advanced that is uipath it's free i made it to our tutorial which you can find by clicking the video to the right thanks a lot for following through post any questions comments and everything in the comments below

Channel: Anders Jensen

Views: 61,886

Keywords: power automate, microsoft power automate, microsoft power automate tutorial, power automate tutorial, introduction to microsoft power automate, power automate beginner, microsoft power automate beginner, anders jensen, power automate beginners tutorial, power automate beginners guide

Id: MIDb3GOY1xI

Length: 31min 12sec (1872 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021