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 costs some additional money, but I'm
going to show you how you could use the free one and it offers tons and tons of functionality that
can really help make your life easier. All right, 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.com,
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 you 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 could
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 e-mail. 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 going to 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 it still refers to Flow, so we're going to 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 in
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, and 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 homepage 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 this search box up here, I'm going to type in YouTube
because this is the app where I'm going to post the video, and I want to see if there are any
existing automations that I could simply use, so I'm going to go ahead and let me put in YouTube
right here and then I'm going to 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 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 into 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 into 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 can 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 textbox,
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 do I want it to post
a Tweet, but maybe I want to have it send out an e-mail to certain people, or maybe I want it
to also post to 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 showing up here. One of the things I could do is I could click on this, and this will
bring me to a summary view of my new Flow. Here I can 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 can 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 going to 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 going to
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 going to
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 anytime 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 you 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 a few different triggers that I can use.
In this case, I want to go with when I upload a video, so I'm going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 in say 10 minutes to take
care of whatever that task was. So, in this case, I'm going to 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 trigger. 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,
so I'm going to type in delay. 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 going to 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 e-mail
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 going to 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 e-mail 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 e-mail notification is the action, so the recurrence,
that's the trigger, the timing, and then the action is some to send an e-mail,
and here in this case, let's see, I'll just type in an e-mail address. Pretend this was my
mom's e-mail 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 CC
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 going to click back in to 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 the 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 interface and then you could 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 a new Flow
from blank. I also have some templates down below and I see some connectors, but I'm going to 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 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, there will probably be even more, but this is a nice way I could set
up automations between apps. All right 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. All right, well, thanks a lot for watching, and I hope to see you next time, bye.