Intelligence and Automation in Microsoft 365

So for our last presentation, I'm Katherine Sanders Reach. I hope I'm sharing my screen correctly. Can you see the screen on the left? That's just my big head and the title of the program. Yes. Awesome, thank you. So Microsoft 365, which was formerly known as Office 365, is a product that came out on the market. I think it's been out for like 7 or 8 years. It's not new, but more and more people are starting to get it, and we'll kind of look at why. It gets better all the time. They keep adding stuff to it. There's a lot of things that are built into it that you may not know about. So I think a lot of people got it thinking, well, this is the new way you buy Microsoft Office, thinking Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel. What you also get with this, depending on which of the packages you get, is the hosted Exchange server, SharePoint, Teams, which includes video conferencing. They folded Skype into it. Now they have voice over IP systems, and OneDrive to store your documents in the cloud. And then cloud versions of all of the Office suite. So Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, there's cloud versions. There's also app versions, so you can get it on your phone too. Then they built intelligence into it, which I'm gonna show you some examples of kind of the more in you're with Microsoft 365, the more it knows about you to, to the point where people are finding it creepy. And we'll talk about that too. And there are things you can do to turn it off, but it's basically an amazing product for $12.50 a month. So the version that most small law offices are probably gonna be looking for, unless you need advanced retention or eDiscovery holds or something like that, is the Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and it's $12.50 a month. The, the next version up, the Business Premium, that has the litigation holds, it has encryption built in to email and things like that. Honestly, I would make an argument that you may not need to encrypt the body of an email much anyway. It's the attachments, which you can password protect them or share them through OneDrive or some other way without putting in some Social Security security number in your email. So I think for most small law offices, Business Standards has plenty of room to grow. So we're just gonna dive into a couple of demos, and I wanna show you some things in applications. Some of this stuff has been in Outlook forever and ever. So if you don't have Office 360 or Microsoft 365, And, you know, some of the things are new, but some of them we've had. So first thing is I mentioned it has some intelligence built into the product. And so it has artificial intelligence built in. So in this particular example, I opened up a PowerPoint presentation and it says, it looks like you presented this file at this conference. Let us help you follow up, share it with the attendees. And I was like, oh my goodness, that is so creepy. What it did was it knew that I had given this presentation because of my Outlook calendar and to offer to help me remember to send the file to the attendees. That's very helpful. And I, in this particular case, ignored the suggestion. But there's other intelligence that they've added into this, like we, we found an event. So I'll show you an example of this. So Pegine and I were talking about, you know, testing the tech for this program, and she sent me an email and said, what would be a good time for you? And Outlook said, we think we found an event. The reason I'm showing this to you is because it's really small. You might not notice it when you open, and this is the Outlook software running on my desktop in a Windows environment, but through Microsoft 365 subscription. So it basically looks through the text of the email and it says, we think we found an event from this person. You can enter location. It also so it knows my calendar, so it says it looks like this conflicts with another event on your schedule. And because this actually, we did actually calendar it for them, so this is in the past, but basically it says it looks like there's an event at 12:30, do you wanna add it to your calendar? So that's the type of activity that you can use the help with, because you see these kinds of things, you go back and forth through email, But if somebody doesn't send you a calendar request, you forget to put it on your calendar. Now, if you don't live and die by your electronic calendar, that might be okay. You might remember. I don't remember things if they're not on my calendar. I calendar everything. I also share my calendar for people to schedule consultations with me. So I really have to manage my calendar effectively. So I just thought this was a very useful little tool. And then other things like action items. You open up an email, it says, we think you found it, we found an action item. Do you want to flag it for follow-up? And it's based on language that's in the actual email. So, you know, do you need follow-up on this? We talked about— Baron talked about Quick Parts, and I love Quick Parts because I'm lazy and I don't want to retype stuff. But the issue with Quick Parts is that they're limited to an installation of either Outlook or Word on your computer and they don't share across a firm and they also are very specific to your location and install. So ALEKS has introduced this thing called templates and templates are available. You can share templates with other people, but you can also access your templates through ALEKS online. So now you have access to more of this stuff. So I'm gonna show you what that looks like. So if I was going to send an email based on a template, I just click on New Email and I click on View Templates, and then I can pick one of the, the text that I've already added and send it. So if I'm replying to someone, I can drop this template in as well. And so I don't have to retype, but the nice thing is that These templates, again, are available in Outlook Web Access. So if I'm not on my computer, I'm using the web, I still have access to these templates. So I don't have to memorize my Zoom link or my Calendly link or things, you know, things that I'm very lazy about, or just any kind of thing that you're kind of typing over again. And then, and it comes with some pre-defined ones. You can also edit the template And so you can see the title. The title is not the subject line of the email, by the way. That's just the title of your template. So unless you're replying to an email, you will have to put in a subject. I'm going to show you how to actually create a little quick step that controls more than just these. But again, the quick steps are specific to your computer, and then you hit Save. The easiest way to create a template is if I go and— whoops— I'm gonna say we're gonna make this into a template. So this is something I could go into my sent mail, or I could type a new email and go, this— I send this all the time. So I'm going to select the text go to View Templates, scroll down to the bottom, click on Template where it says little plus, and then I can copy this text, place it in here. Whoops, that's not the text. That was a question for Tom from last session. And then, I mean, obviously that's a bit brief, but you can see that it works and it can be pretty long. There is a character limitation. I haven't hit it yet. I haven't tried. So, you know, you probably don't want to do paragraphs and paragraphs of templates, but you could also create multiple templates. So when you're sending an email, you send, you know, you can add different parts of templates into an email. Now otherwise, with Quick Parts, Oops. I still use Quick Parts too, but I know that they may disappear. This is one of the examples that I used, I used to use. This is a long one for if you were advising a client on how to dress to go to court, but that seems rather quaint these days, doesn't it? Yes, I'm glad someone just told me they love the templates. I do too. I like them because they have a little bit more expandability than the, um, the Quick Parts. Because you think, well, I'm always on my computer. I was at the law library getting some work done, didn't feel like pulling out my laptop, using the law library computer, wanted to go send an email, logged into office.com, realized I don't have my Quick Parts, but I did have my templates, and there they were in OWA. So, you know, it helps. I'm not going to go through this. I have a number of articles I'm going to send you that I've written about and some videos too that I'll send you about this stuff. But there's some other little add-ons that make your life complete. One of them is called FindTime. So someone is saying I use Office 365, but we have Google Apps for Business. So we accomplish this via TextExpander. Perfect. So Google Apps for Business, which is now called, I think, Google Works or something like that. They can't, just like Microsoft, they keep changing the name. A lot of this stuff carries over in terms of functionality 'cause they're competing, which is, anytime we have companies competing for business, this is a good thing for end users. But FindTime is this thing where you basically can go in and say, okay, Tom, Dick, and Jane, here's some availability to have a meeting, and it sends them all out a little meeting poll. They click on it. If you've ever used something like Doodle, it's like Doodle except it's built into your Outlook. And so it knows your schedule already, and it also knows any of the schedules of the people in the firm before you start emailing for availability outside. So it just, it's a very useful little plugin. It's from Microsoft and it's free. So this is what it looks like. When I send out, I pick times. Here's the attendees. Then if you sent it to someone, they would get an email, click on select options. You have a dashboard. It's a very easy to use but sophisticated little tool when you have to get multiple parties together to figure out and availability for multiple people. And I just was asked, do you think there's a winner between G Suite and Microsoft? Can I answer that with it depends? It depends on what you need it for. Hands down, you need Microsoft Word if you need— you have sophisticated document requirements. If you you need to be able— so you could get away with using G Suite and just buy a copy of Word. I really like Outlook for Business. I think it depends on if you were always a Gmail user and you're used to that interface. I hate Gmail's interface. I hate labels. I don't know, I've just, you know, so I guess they're stasis. So anyway, Insights is another bit of intelligence that's built in. I'm actually going to show you what this looks like again, because it's It's both useful and kind of creepy. So it's this thing that lives up in your ribbon. And if you click on it, it goes through and tries to encourage you to plan some time away. So it's like a life coach. So schedule some time to focus, schedule some time to quit working so much. That's all very nice, but you know, leave me alone. The next thing is prepare for your meetings. You've got 2 meetings tomorrow, 4 meetings next week. Have you prepared? Have you done the agendas? Have you reviewed the documents that are necessary? This is where I find this Insights thing useful. Follow-up on a request. I ask people for stuff. Have they done it? And I— or did they— did they ask me for something and have I done it? So these are kind of all things that, again, this artificial intelligence is going through Outlook and making these determinations. It's not sharing it. Anywhere. It's just telling you, here's what we found. I find it quite helpful. And then the other thing that has been coming out is the daily email briefing, which is based on Cortana. And Cortana is the— it's Windows 10 version of Siri in your iPhone. It's a voice-activated assistant. I'm not a huge fan. I have Cortana turned off on my computer, so whatever is driving this is not based on my voice activity. And it's very similar to Insights, but it's a little bit more discreet. So I'll show you what the Cortana briefing looks like. But first it reminds you, this is just for you, no one else sees it, we're not sharing it. And then it shows you things like, you know, here's, here's a commitment that you made to do something. You can set reminders. You can unsubscribe from this if you find getting an email with activities that you forgot or you should follow up on irritating, then unsubscribe from it and you'll never get it again. Anyway, then there's things like Quick Steps. Quick Steps has been in Outlook forever and ever, but it's one of those tools that I absolutely adore. And I'm going to show you why. Because it's like what Baron showed you, except quicker and easier. So some of the quick steps that I have. So every Monday, or every, every Monday, I send an email to 3 people on my team with the same basic information. And so I created a quick step. So when I click on that, it's it creates a new email message to these people with the subject line filled in. And then I just have to put in the title, description, and the link. So I write a blog post every week, I send it to my team to put out through eBarr. If you have repeat repetitive activities like this, so I don't have to go back into my sent mail and copy and paste and do all this stuff. I just have this set up. So it's all done. There's other things that it can do. Like if I get an email from Peggy and I want to add it to my calendar, the way that Outlook works is when you go to respond with a meeting, there's no way to respond and add to calendar or delete it. So you can, you know, I can drag it to my calendar if I don't want it to be a meeting. So if I just wanted to put this on my calendar but not create a meeting, I just created a QuickPart that says Add to Calendar. I can also add a step that says delete the original message, because now this message is part of my calendar. So all those things you can do. I can hit Reply and Delete. And the way you create them is you can Create New, and there's a bunch of different kind of pre-formatted actions. But if you don't wanna be hampered By that, you click on the— this little caret is awfully useful because all the really good stuff is under it. So if you go to New, I'm going to create a completely custom one. So I'm going to call this, I'm too busy. We would never really use this in real life. So I'm going to choose an action first. And so you just kind of follow the bouncing ball. So I'm going to choose an action. And that action is I want to reply to an email. So I'll scroll down to Reply, and then I'm gonna click Show Options. So this is if, if someone emails me, I'm gonna click this Quick Step to reply to them, and I'm going to respond to them— whoops— with a particular message. And that message is So what I'm saying— and this isn't an out-of-office, this is triggered by me. So if I get an email and I need to say, you know what, I'm not gonna be able to get to this email— I have a bad habit of setting unrealistic expectations. I answer email really fast. So if you have this bad habit, you can buy yourself some time because really people are just looking for a response. And if the response is, I don't have time to deal with it right now, you create that quick step. And so this is the reply to the subject for the something that somebody asked you for. I'm going to flag it for follow-up. So, you know, I'm going to flag it for follow-up tomorrow. I'm also going to add a CC because if you'll notice, I said I'll copy my assistant and get back to you as soon as possible. So I want some accountability. So I'm going to copy my assistant. And then if I wanted to keep going, I could move this to a folder. So I could click on Add Another Action, choose an action, Move to Folder, and pick a folder if I already had a folder, um, that said, you know, for follow-up or something like that. We'll just put it in this one and click Finish and click OK. So now when someone emails me and I don't have time to respond to them but I feel like they need a response, then I click on I'm too busy and it addresses it to that person, CCs my assistant, says what's going on, puts it in that folder, flags it for follow-up for me. And you can infinitely, as long as it's within Outlook, add as many steps as you want to be able to do these things in a single click that would take a whole lot of individual steps. So again, when we're talking about automation, it doesn't have to be code. It doesn't have to be difficult. This is simple stuff. You just have to have the notion of what you want to do, what drives you crazy, and then do it. I actually learned about Quick Steps from lawyers who like to BCC themselves on email. And so they would respond to a client and BCC themselves. So it'd come back in their inbox and it would put it in a folder. And then we talked about tools that actually help you folder things more effectively than, than BCC. But hey, you know, if that's something that you do, then you can write a Quick Step that BCCs and puts it in a folder for you. So lots of different options that you've got. So looking at Microsoft Word, I know you're probably really tired of Word, but I just wanted to show you a couple of things. Again, low-code, no-code stuff that you've already got in the product. And so the first one I want to show you is in autocorrect. So let me pull up a document to show you what I'm talking about. And you can actually create a whole custom dictionary using this kind of format. You create a file with a DIC in Notepad and you can upload it. But for the purposes of this, we're just going to use something low-key. So say you are constantly dropping in a particular segment or a section of a, a piece of code or an act or something like that. So we're going to just select Social Security Act, 42 USC 401(k)(1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46)(47)(48)(49)(50)(51)(52)(53)(54)(55)(56)(57)(58)(59)(60)(61)(62)(63)(64)(65)(66)(67)(68)(69)(70)(71)(72)(73)(74)(75)(76)(77)(78)(79)(80)(81)(82)(83)(84)(85)(86)(87)(88)(89)(90)(91)(92)(93)(94)(95)(96)(97)(98)(99)(100)(101)(102)(103)(104)(105)(106)(107)(108)(109)(110)(111)(112)(113)(114)(115)(116)(117)(118)(119)(120)(121)(122)(123)(124)(125)(126)(127)(128)(129)(130)(131)(132)(133)(134)(135)(136)(137)(138)(139)(140)(141)(142)(143)(144)(145)(146)(147)(148)(149)(150)(151)(152)(153)(154)(155)(156)(157)(158)(159)(160)(161)(162)(163)(164)(165)(166)(167)(178)(179)(180)(181)(182)(183)(184)(185)(186)(187)(188)(189)(190)(191)(202)(203)(204)(205)(206)(207)(208)(209)(210)(211)(212)(213)(214)(215)(216)(217)(218)(219)(220)(221)(222)(223)(224)(225)(226)(227)(228)(229)(230)(231)(232)(233)(234)(235)(236)(237)(238)(239)(240)(241)(242)(243)(244)(245)(246)(247)(248)(249)(250)(251)(252)(253)( You should know where this is anyway. If you go to File and then Options and then Display, Proofing, there's a button called AutoCorrect Options. If you never want Microsoft to correct an open paren, C, close paren into a copyright symbol again, you can delete it. All of, all of this pre-formatted stuff, when it turns you know, any of these symbols into a character, when it corrects spelling, stuff like that, you can actually go through and tell it to stop and remove it from this. But you can also add things to it. So I selected this text in the document, and you'll note that it is now here. And the reason I selected it is because there's no way to add special characters. So the section marks I can't get unless I copy it from another source. And then this is a trick that Baron taught me. I'm going to put a slash and I'm going to say SSA in caps. One of the things to know about this autocorrect library, this is across Microsoft. So this will now work in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel. So if you go and make changes to this particular, um, unlike Quick Parts, which doesn't share across the different applications. This actually does, and I'll show you what it looks like. So you'll also see that I have one for my name. So I'm going to click Add and click OK, get out of that. Now the next time I want to drop that phrase in, I'm going to hit /ssa, hit Enter, and it pops it in there. Same thing with my name. So anything that you don't have to want to, don't want to have to retype, just copy, select the text, go in there, add it to your autocorrect feature in Word. The reason I put slashes is because it is less likely to be confused with something you commonly type. If you meant to type SSA, And it's going to autocorrect every time you do it, it'll drive you nuts. So using some sort of character to distinguish it. Also, it is case sensitive. So uppercase with a slash, it's probably pretty unique. It's not like you're going to run into that. But that's, that's, again, that's an easy automation that you can do. It's built into Word since, I don't know, Word 2003. So That is something to play around with. All right. Next thing I want to show you is mail merge real quick. Again, this is an automation that, um, is something that makes life really easy for you if you use it. And the example that I'm going to show you is a collections letter. So say you're using QuickBooks and you go into your aged receivables and you run a report that shows you everybody who owes you past net 60, and you want to send out an email to remind them to pay their bill. You don't want to go and create a new email for each, you know, open your spreadsheet on one screen, open your email on another, type your letter, and then, you know, resend the letter and, you know, change the information. There's an easier way to do that. Anything you can get in a spreadsheet, you can merge into a document. Now, mail merge is what Clio and Practice Panther and ActionStep and just about every other product that's a practice management application, this concept of the merge fields is all they're using for the simple document assembly that they do. But it's also built into Word. And as long as you can get the data into a spreadsheet, which most reports can be, you know, put into a spreadsheet, you can do this. The other thing is if you have a form that you give to clients to collect information from them, you can also merge the data from the form because most form tools like Microsoft Forms or Google Forms or JotForm or Typepad or whatever you might want to use, the responses come back and you can get them into a spreadsheet. So again, if you get the data into a spreadsheet, you can merge it into a document. So I'm just going to show you this quick example. So here's my, my letter to this, this delinquent client about needing to get paid up. And you'll see, like Baron's examples, I've got some variables. So I've got the client name, and I've just got some kind of blanks. USX for this invoice, it was due on this date, it's X days old, click here to pay us, you know. Now say, like I said, I went in QuickBooks, I ran, um, an aged receivables report to get this information. So the other side of this is you're going to need a spreadsheet that has headers, and I'll show you why in just a second. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to this tab called Mailings And it's actually there by default. And I find it easiest just to remind me to go through all the steps is I click Start Mail Merge, and then I say Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard. Once you get used to doing this, you don't have to use the Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard, but we'll do it for this one because it, it's again, follow the bouncing ball. So we've got Mail Merge, and I'm going to use email messages because I want this information to go directly into an Outlook email and out the door. After I review it. So we'll choose email. Next step is starting a document. And it says, do you want to use the document? So I find it easy to pull up the document I'm going to be using. And then it'll say, do you want to use the current document? Yes, in fact I do. Then next, select recipients. So use an existing list. You can download from your Outlook contacts. You can type up a new list. I've got an existing list, so I'm going to click browse. And for— it always defaults to the last list you used. And there's our spreadsheet. Now what it says is, here's, here's what you want to use. Here's when it was created and modified. First row of data contains column headers. Very important, otherwise matching these fields up is gonna be a real bear. So you wanna say okay. And then it actually shows you what's in this spreadsheet. So if you wanted to sort it or filter it or find duplicates or whatever, so you can manipulate the spreadsheet outside of Excel, in this mail merge process, which is, you know, great. So, and I can say I only want to do these 3 people. So we'll, you know, we'll deselect them. And I'm just going to do these 3 people say they have, how about these 4, they're the most egregious. So click OK. And then next, write your email. Write your email is not exactly the same as write your email because you, this is your email. But what it means is this is where you're going to merge fields in. So I've got some variables, payment needed for invoice number 1234. That is a variable. So I'm going to select this and I'm going to go into insert merge field and I'm going to choose invoice. And you're starting to recognize this little bit of code, but again, this is the most codey you get. And then we're going to say sent via. Now you could have a dropdown option here. We're actually just sending it through email. So we're gonna do that. And then client name. In this case, we've got first name and last name. One thing to remember is there needs to be a space. And then you just keep going through and identifying. So we're going to go— this one is the, the balance due. Again, the variable for the invoice is just due on— what date was this due? And is now X days late. And just make sure that you have spaces. Once you do that, you can review. So once you finish doing that, you can actually go through and review what these look like. So you'll see the names change, the amounts change, and you also notice that you don't have a space here. So you can go back and make that edit and then go back. That's why I like that little wizard, because you can go back and forth really easily in the steps and not worry about messing things up. And once you're happy with how this looks, you click on Complete the Merge. And then you had already selected you want to do email, so email, you can say, and then we can choose which records to send. And click OK. And then in the background, and it may take a minute, it's actually really quick today. So you can see that in my sent mail, that letter that I just did. So for 1, no big deal. For 10, starting to Think about how this might be useful. If you have 15, 20 of these and you have different variables, different collection days, different collection time, you know, dues, different bills due or whatever, all of a sudden this becomes making quick work of something that would be rather tedious and you might put it off otherwise. So, and then I had sent this to myself when I was creating this example and I actually saw it in my my Gmail inbox, because that's where I sent it from. And it got me to pay attention. I was like, what? Oh no, I did that to myself. The other thing is, and we're running out of time, so I'm gonna skip this because I'm gonna send you an article about it, but Microsoft Word Online, well actually Microsoft Word installed and online has a dictation feature now. So you can dictate directly into Word. And it does a really good job. You can have it add punctuation automatically, or you can, if you're used to old school dictation where you say paragraph, next period, next paragraph, things like that, you can still speak those commands to it. But the other thing is, and this is something lawyers ask me about a lot, is Transcribe. And Transcribe is really cool because say you're recording phone calls, recording Zoom meetings, and you wanna get a transcription. Used to be you'd send the file and have somebody actually transcribe it for you and pay for it. Now you can upload it into Word Online, and it goes through, takes the audio file. I'll show you an example just because it's kind of cool. So this is Word Online. And I had a Zoom recording that I uploaded the file to this Word document. And so you go into this Dictate tab and you click on Transcribe. And it's going to look for the audio file. It identifies as well as it can multiple speakers' voices, so identifies it by different speakers. I can edit the text. I can actually go to this segment and listen to the text to help me edit it. And then once I'm happy with it, I can just plop it into the document. And then if I don't want the speaker identified, I could remove that. So on and so forth. So it does a pretty good job. It's far from perfect, but if you need help with transcription and don't wanna pay, or have found that people aren't as fast at doing this anymore as they used to be, you have a tool built into Office. So moving into Microsoft Teams, it's something that everybody's very excited about in 365. For good reason, it does a lot of stuff. But right now, the thing that everybody is super excited about is something called Lists. And Lists were originally available in SharePoint, but now they are in Teams. They're slightly different beasts, but I'm gonna show you how they might be useful to you, especially if you're using Teams. I'm gonna fire up Teams. And I have a whole video on Teams if you've never used it or, you know, whatever. You can get a sense, but Teams, you can basically for— you can either do this oriented by client or matter. Or project or whatever, however you organize things in your firm, and then you have all these discrete channels. You can invite people in your firm to, to participate in this, or you can use it by yourself. My, my company uses Slack, so I, I use Teams all by myself. You can store files. This basically creates a SharePoint library. You can create little wikis, so planning notes, things like that. And then the newest thing is they've added lists. So if you click on this plus sign here, you can add not only things that are within the Microsoft ecosystem, you can add other things that you use. So if you're a big Trello user or an Asana or, you know, the one thing and Clio. Clio is now integrated with Teams. So there's a lot that you can do outside of Microsoft within Teams. What I'm gonna show you is lists. So we're gonna create a new list, and we're gonna do this one, and this one is to prompt us to do a conflicts check. It's not going to do the conflicts check for you. It's going to help you make sure that you— actually, someone did do the conflicts check. And we'll click Create. And I'm not gonna run through the whole thing, 'cause I'll show you a finished example, but just to give you a sense. So once I've got this, then because I chose to use a blank one, you have to have something called Title. That is a required field. You don't have to settle for the name Title if you need to rename it. So I might rename this Required or something like that. And then you can add all sorts of different columns to this, so a single line of text, multiple choice, date and time. So I'm going to add a date and time, and we're going to say Date Added, and we want date and time. Include time, yes or no. For this, probably not. You have a lot more options that you can go through to make this very specific. It has some conditional link built in. We're gonna go and do another one, and we're gonna say triggering event. So this is gonna be a multiple choice, and so we're gonna pick Yes/No. Actually, we don't want Yes/No, which is nice because I didn't commit to it. Choice. And we're gonna call this Triggering Event, and our choices are going to be Email, web form, and these would basically be what's triggering the need to do this conflict. And we'll click Save. Then we're going to add who is assigned this. So we're going to check Person, and we'll say Assigned To, and the description. And we'll click Save. And then the last one we'll add, just for giggles, is Date Completed. So that's another date. And save. Then that's in this SharePoint channel. And then you can go through, and if I click New, and I can rearrange these columns. I can, you know, make them look a little bit prettier. I can add more, all that kind of stuff. I can filter the responses. But if I click New Item, then it's required. We'll put in— and you can have it default to today's date. Triggering event was the web form. I'm going to be responsible for kicking this off. And then you'll have a date complete. This also, there's some defaults that don't show up, but things like add attachment. So if I saved the email from the potential client as an attachment, um, I could add that attachment here, so on and so forth, and save. And then this information shows up. One of the things that is built-in automation with this is if you create, um, a list and it has an assigned to or a name in any way, Everybody who's named within the organization— this does not work outside, but within your firm— anybody who is a user of 365 will get an email to let them know that they've been named on a list of some sort. So I'll eventually— it's not super quick— get an email notifying me that, that I have an assignment on a list that I should go look at. And that's not something that you have to set up. That's something that is automatically in there. So I'll show you a different, a different list that I created in SharePoint, because that's where I first found them. And I, for whatever reason, these little icons do not speak to me at all. So in SharePoint, I'll just show you another list. And kind of where this comes from. I had created one called client ticketing, and this was to track basically if you have, um, people in the firm getting phone calls, paralegals, receptionists, different people who have people making requests, then you would want to be able to track it like a ticketing system for an IT help desk. And I know that it is not something that law firms think about, but the reality is stuff falls through the cracks because somebody took a call and they meant to tell somebody else to do something. So have them just enter it into this kind of tracking— Issue Tracking is what the actual app is called. And then you can put in, you know, and then you can assign it to somebody. I assign all this to me. Is this an active Status, has it been resolved? So you'll be changing those things. Is it a high priority? You enter a description. Is this a current client? Yup. Any related issues, more notes, due date, we'll say 12/18, any attachments. And then save this. What did I leave blank? And you'll get this little list. And again, I will get— because it's been assigned to me, I'm going to get an email that tells me that I've had a ticket assigned to me, and I'll need to go through and And you can put— you can do all sorts of things. You can add permissions and workflows and all that kind of stuff. But these are just— I'm just giving you simple examples of things that help you keep from having things fall through the cracks, that have accountability, that are easy to build yourself. It does take a little bit of time, but not like coding a Word document. So if you've never used the To-Do app, It's a little superfluous considering everything else that 365 has built into it, but I have an article that explains what To Do is. The one thing in terms of automation that To Do has is it's basically, they bought a product called Wunderlist, which is a really good little task management tool. Now, if you flag an email for follow-up in Outlook, shows up as a suggestion in To-Do. So there's your big automation. But if you used To-Do and you kind of find yourself flagging emails for follow-up and not actually doing anything, To-Do will then pop up reminders and kind of spur you on. So if you use your inbox as a task list, consider using it in conjunction with To-Do. And then bookings, which is, I mentioned Calendly early on. Calendly is something where When somebody wants to schedule an appointment with me, I send them a link. They find availability based on my availability on my calendar, and they can book time with me. The thing is, I use the free product, and the free product is limited to one event type. Bookings is built into 365. It's free, and you can build in multiple types. So you can have, you know, a half-hour free consultation. You can have a full-hour paid consultation. You can have different types of meetings, and you can have different people be available for different— it's so— it's a firm-wide automated calendaring tool for people to be able to schedule things. You can post it on your website, you can send a link via email. There's lots of different ways to set up. You can set it up to where it texts— sends text reminders to the people who have signed up for a meeting. You can automate So say if somebody came and booked a meeting with me on through Bookings, I could automate the reminder to be sent out 2 days before so that if they were going to bail on me, they could tell me before they did it and I didn't sit on Zoom like a sad person. So anyway, Bookings is— and again, I have an article about it, I'll send you in a video, but it's, it's a complete thing. For products that cost a good bit of money as a standalone, it's already built into 365. The thing that I wanna spend the next 5 minutes on, and then we will open it for questions and let you go, is Power Automate. And Power Automate used to be called Flow. And this is probably one of the things that if you've ever looked at Zapier or this product called If This Then That, than that. This is Microsoft's answer to this. It does work with tools outside of Microsoft, but it works best with tools inside of Microsoft. Um, so there's that. Like Zapier, you don't have to start from scratch. You can actually just create, uh, you can go look for templates and start playing around with it. So I'm going to show you one that's really easy to set up. And based on a template. So I'm going to go back here. I'm going to go back to Microsoft Office. It— this— when I'm going into the browser, all of these things like SharePoint is through the browser. There probably is some download application. I don't want to see it or touch it. It's much easier. They've built this for the web. It's It's easier to use. It's simpler. If, however, you've taken SharePoint training before, you may find this frustrating because it's not— it doesn't feel as complete. You can tweak it to get an old version and, and see the horrible interface that it used to have that you got familiar with. So when I'm going into Power Automate, I'm going into my Office Tools. Which, if you wanna see them lined up with descriptions a little bit, just click down on this. And I'm just going to office.com and logging in. And so you've got all the things. Lists is now embedded in SharePoint, embedded in Teams, and a standalone app. People are really hot for Teams, or Lists right now. But, and then there's this Power Apps, and you can actually build bots, but quite frankly, I'm not going to show you anything I haven't tried, and I haven't tried that yet. So the thing I want to show you is Power Automate. And Power Automate is actually— it depends on how sophisticated you want to get. You can also find that it wants you to pay them for different ones depending on how far you stretch the capabilities. But for simple automations, You can create this. So if you go to templates, then it'll show you different templates based on different apps. And there's also different things that create a flow. There's automatic flows, there's triggered flows. So we're just gonna look at trigger flows. Trigger flows means you did something and now you want your technology to do something else. Which to me is 99% of the time is what I wanna have happen. So I'm gonna look at email. Seems like email is ripe for opportunities to improve things. And so the very first template they have is Save Office 365 Email Attachments to OneDrive for Business. Sounds like a winner to me. Let's go look and see what this does. So It basically says we've got these two things that we're gonna connect, and I'm gonna click on Create Flow. And if that's all I did, then it'd be done. If all I wanted to do was say every time I get an attachment, put that attachment from the email into a folder in OneDrive, It already creates the folder in OneDrive for you. You're done. But let's look at getting a little bit more sophisticated because frankly, just offloading all of the attachments into a OneDrive folder, it's not, not all that useful. So we're gonna click on Edit. And I'm gonna click on— so basically it's got these two steps already built in. On New Email coming into my inbox, but I'm clicking on Advanced Options, and I'm gonna say From, and I'm gonna say From this person. These are people in my contacts. If it includes attachments, then the next thing I want to do is scroll down here and click on Create File. Now it automatically created a folder path in OneDrive for email attachments from Power Automate. I don't want that one. I'm gonna click on this little itty tiny folder and look at my OneDrive. And now I can see my entire folder structure in OneDrive. And we're gonna go find the appropriate folder for any attachments sent to me by Eric that are automatically— they're still attached to the email, but they're also being saved in the appropriate OneDrive folder. And so I'm gonna go through and find Planning and Administration. If I wanted to go and get even more granular, I can go through all these different options and see kind of other things. I can add conditionals, I can get all sorts of crazy, but I'm pretty happy with this one. Now there's other things you can do. You can keep going. You can say condition, if the attachment is Excel, do this with it. You— so you can keep kind of building these things out. If I don't need conditions, I can click Next Step, and then I can pick another thing. So say I wanted to also send a note to Teams, to a team that Eric had put this folder, this file, and I've shared it in my OneDrive that's attached to Teams. I can go and add a member to a team or post a message. We'll do that. And we'll pick a team's ID. So we'll see PM Admin. And Eric has a new shared file. Okay. And then save. And like what Baron was showing you, it shows you errors. So it says a channel is required. So we will do that channel and click Save. Now obviously that is way easier than what he had to do to test his, his automation. Basically, it goes, yeah, you gotta do this again. Then there's this little flow checker to make sure that everything goes right. You can test it. If you can test it by yourself, you can test it, and then you can save it. Then if you have this thing running, I'm gonna click save. And go back to— once you've created flows, they're all here. You can see when they were modified, what kind of flows they are, and then if you wanna go see how often something has been run, you can go and It shows your run history here, when it was created, when it was modified. I'll go back to— well, apparently I wasn't using that one anymore. I have probably experimented more with this stuff, but those are the— that's, again, this is super simple stuff. You can get super complicated with it. You can do all sorts of things. And if you'll notice, it's not just the Microsoft products. It's a little like Zapier in that there are more connectors than just the Microsoft stuff. You've got all sorts of different— there's, there's a lot. So lots and lots and lots of different options here with Power Automate. Pick a few simple templates, play around with it, you'll start getting ideas for what you want to do. And then just be patient, because it takes a little time to build them out. Not that much. So that is it. I appreciate your time and your attention. Sorry, went over a little bit. I am going to stop the recording and open it for any final questions and let you guys go.