There is an incredibly useful tool that was added
to Windows relatively recently, but not many people know about. It’s called “Power Automate
Desktop” and it’s basically a way to automate almost anything you can think of, and it’s GUI
based so you don’t have to know how to code. These automations you create are called Flows,
and you can see how you have an enormous list of possible actions you can have it do step by
step. Anything from copying or deleting a folder, to taking a screenshot or printing a document, to
setting some variable to use in another action, or even checking if a window contains a certain text.
And of course, you can set conditions to only do steps in certain cases, and loop a set of steps
as long as you need. So if you aren’t someone who knows how to code, this is actually a good way
to learn some of the basic high level concepts. If you’re on Windows 11 it should already be
installed, but if you’re on Windows 10 you can just install it through the Microsoft Store.
At this point you might think this is cool, but you aren’t really sure of the
practical use of it. So I’ll give you a real example of an actual automation
I created, and I think it’s pretty cool. Before we do that though, speaking
of cool programs and services, I want to thank today’s sponsor, Mine. Mine lets
you find out which companies have your data, and let's you control where you do or don't want
to keep it. You start out by going to SayMine.com, and just sign in with your email account you want
to analzye, and give it a minute to do it's thing. Mine will only analyze the subject line and
sender of the email, the first line preview snippet, plus some metadata to figure out
which companies you've interacted with, but as their privacy policy states, they
do not collect the content of your email for the analysis. Then when it's done,
it shows you the results. For me there are over 250 companies that have
data on me... a bit concerning... On the 'my footprint' page I can
see a selection of these companies, but I prepared myself and looked at the tab
showing all the companies, and it is eye opening. By clicking on a company, it shows me for example
that EA stores info like my financial and identity data, and even online behavior data. And I can
see that it has a pretty elevated exposure risk. Here's another company that I barely remember
signing up for but never ended up using, and I don't really want them having
my data, so I can just click reclaim, and it will compose an email that will be
sent directly from my inbox to the company. And this is important because companies
generally only honor requests coming directly from the person. Then, after you
allow it to send the email, you can track and review your requests, and cancel it
within an hour if you change your mind. And since privacy is important for businesses too,
Mine has created a solution for companies to help manage their own privacy operations, including
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data, be sure to visit SayMine.com and sign up. And I'll also put that link in the description.
And with that all being said, let's continue. Alright so for this automation, what I wanted to
do was actually pretty complicated. Basically, I wanted to know when Microsoft publishes
a new app in the Microsoft Store, because they’ve been known in the past
to quietly release some cool apps without really telling anyone. It’s easy enough to
see a list of all the apps they publish, but there are around 700 of them, and they
are not sorted by date. Gee it sure would be nice if I could have a program automatically go
through the entire list and show me if anything new was added since last time. So that’s
exactly what I created, let’s take a look. First let me finish explaining the interface so
you know what's going on. On the right side you can see a list of all these variables, most of
which are automatically created for the action, and it’s not as complicated as it looks.
For example, you can use the action to get the current date and time, and then it
creates a variable called “CurrentDateTime”, but you can also rename it.
At the top you have controls, including one that just lets you record what
you’re doing, so if the task is simple enough, you might not even need to set anything
manually. You can also copy and paste actions, move them around, disable them, and run the
flow starting at a certain point. You can even set breakpoints which will pause the flow at a
certain point, like to debug or check a variable. Alright so now let’s go through how my flow
works, because it has a good mix of various functions to show you what this is capable
of. The first thing it does is launches a new Google chrome window to that web page
that shows all the Microsoft apps. This next part was tricky though, because you see
on this page, it doesn’t show the whole list. It makes you keep clicking “show
more results” until all 700 are shown. Fortunately you can create loops, so I found
a javascript code snippet online that lets you click any button on a webpage, and I set it to
just click that “Show More Results” button. Then it does that a number of times, which I set
it to 20. Then it checks if that “Show More Results” button is still there, and if it is,
it goes back and does 20 more again. I could have it check every time it clicks the button, but
that goes way slower than just spam clicking it. Next I used the “extract data from web page”
action, where it basically asks you to select a couple examples of what data you want,
in this case I want the names of the apps, and then it's smart enough to auto detect all
the rest of them, and turns it into some text. These next actions are just little things to
clean up and prepare the text, like removes any blank spaces at the end, converts it into a
list, and sorts it alphabetically. It also puts this list into a variable called LatestAppList
for later. Next, it opens a new Excel file, pastes the list in there, then saves the
spreadsheet with a filename that has the current date. That way by saving the file, I
can use it to compare the lists in the future. But next is where it starts comparing a previous
list file I’ve made before. So it pops up a dialogue that lets me select an existing list.
This function even lets you choose which folder to select from, and filter to only show certain
files if you want. After I choose an old list, it copies the data from the spreadsheet and
puts it into a variable called OldAppList, and uses this function called “Subtract Lists”,
which compares that variable to the LatestAppList, and creates a new list with only the
entries that are in the latest list, and not the old. So now I have the list of
only newly added Apps, and it puts them in the clipboard. Just as a finishing touch,
I even have it open Notepad and paste them for me to see. There’s basically no
way I could have done this manually. But like I showed, this just scratches the
surface. For example, if I wanted to get fancy, instead of having to select the Excel file myself,
I could have it get a list of the files in that folder sorted by date and pick that automatically
and continue on, so it would be fully automatic, and then pop up a notification only
if there is a new thing found. Wait, I did actually do all that! As you can
see here. In this more advanced version, I also made a variable for the path to the list
folder so I can just change it by just changing that one variable, and then a bunch of the actions
below reference that. And I made it write to a text file as a log in the case it does find new
apps, so it really does everything for me now. Now as cool as this Power Automate program
is, it’s not perfect, there are some really dumb things about it. For example, you can’t
just have it run it offline, you HAVE to log into it with a Microsoft account. But at least it
keeps the flows backed up in the cloud I guess. Speaking of backing up though, another stupid
thing is if you want to export and save a flow, like to share with a friend, there’s no official
way to do that. What you can do is select all of the actions in a flow, then hit copy, which
will put them in text format. Then you can put them in a text file, and if you want to restore
them, just copy all the text, and hit paste in a flow and they should all show up. So it
does work, it's just a little bit convoluted. Oh and finally the dumbest thing, is even
though it’s literally an automation program, there is no way to automatically schedule a
flow to run, you HAVE to run it manually. So if you want to automatically run something on
startup, tough luck. Apparently they reserve that ability for business users, even though
it’s included in Windows 11 Home. VERY Dumb. Also quick random note I’ll just throw in here, if you want the browser and
web actions to work correctly, you have to make sure you install the browser
extension for whatever browser you’re using. Now when you go and open the app there
are a few examples, but if you want to mess around with the one I made, I’ll put a
link to that text file in the description, so you can just copy and paste it into your
own flow. You’ll just have to change that first variable to a folder you want to use, and then it
should be set, though the first time it runs it will display a message that no previous lists
were found. Yep, I added a check for that too. So hopefully this video gave you an idea of what
this could be used for, and maybe you already know something it would be good for, so definitely let
us know about that down in the comments if you do. Thanks again to Mine for sponsoring the
video, be sure to visit SayMine.com so you can start reclaiming your data too.
The link is also in the description. And of course do all the usual stuff,
click that big fat thumbs up button, consider subscribing, and also clicking
the bell to enable notifications, because these days YouTube might not show
you the videos even if you do subscribe. If you want to keep watching, the next
video I’d recommend is about another cool website that lets you scan files with
basically every antivirus all at once, I’ll put that link right here. So thanks so much
for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.
