Sourcing Automation with Power Desktop Automate

Alright, looks like we are live. I had a little bit of audio trouble and switched to new headphones. Actually, these are my old headphones, but they're from my mobile phone. I hadn't connected them to computer. So anyway, I am back and looks like we have at least one person watching today. Awesome. There were 23 people that voted that they wanted to see Microsoft Power Automate, or I should say Microsoft Power Desktop Automate. So I'm a little surprised that there's only 2 people watching, but let's give folks a minute or two here, and I'm going to share my screen. So that means you're going to see the dreaded picture-in-picture thing for just a second. There we go. All right, so open this up and share. Okay, so this is pretty timely because I've been working a lot on automation, and I've been finding Flow, which is now Power Automate, pretty useful. I've used the Microsoft built-in— if you have SharePoint or if you have Office I think it's Office 365 or Microsoft 365, um, whatever they're calling it now, then this comes with your, with your package. If you have Teams, for example, then you have this. And that is there's a way to create forms and there's a way to create automations. It's pretty powerful. The automations that, that existed prior to what I'm about to show you were very powerful, and I had already created a bunch of them at the enterprise level. I created a workflow that was used by all of Fiserv for all the hiring managers when they wanted to open a new requisition before it got approved and went into Workday. And it was a really tedious manual email-based process before, and I created this through, through Flow. So it was used extensively, something like 6,000 requisitions or something like that. Went through that. So as you can see, it supports, you know, pretty heavy usage. And then I started playing around with Power Automate Desktop, which is a downloadable version that allows you to do things on your desktop that are not cloud-only, or that are not just on the cloud, but things that you can do kind of like, you know, the old-fashioned macros, and, and, you know, but be able to record actions on your screen, which is essentially the best of both worlds. So now you can have both and you can do a lot, actually do more than what scrapers can do. So the web scrapers that are out there, they're just working off of cloud documents. It's web only, which is great. Something like, what's the one that we talked about before? PhantomHub, Octoparse, those kinds. And I think DataMiner was something that we talked about as well. But now you can also do this with, with desktop, and there's a lot more that you can do. For example, you can automatically organize your documents in dedicated files. You can create actions. You can create documents. What I was doing was taking the result of a form and putting it into a Word document that was then emailed, and the email would wait for approval. The person would approve but go to the next approval, and finally when it was all approved, it would go to the final person then that would, you know, actually get it into Workday. So that's an example of automated flows that was on the cloud. This one, what I want to show you today, is a combination of both because you can do desktop recordings as well. There's things you can do, like for example, detach attachments from your email and save them to a SharePoint or a OneDrive when you have people emailing you resumes. That's a great way to do it, especially if you have a dedicated inbox for example, it could just essentially put it into that drive, and the drive can be a shared drive that everybody has access to. So essentially all the recruiters sharing the resumes of their candidates into the shared drive means you have a, you know, a data repository for resumes. That's just one idea. You can create rows in a spreadsheet. You can take data from a spreadsheet and put it into lists that are really powerful. Lists on Microsoft Teams, for example, allow you to do sorting and views and visualizations, graphical visualizations. So imagine if you can take your CRM data and report it out. Most CRMs, a lot of them have the ability to export data, and some of them have the link to Excel, which is like a live Excel document. You can take that live Excel document and turn it into a real-time spreadsheet, which then transforms into a real-time list, and see the data in Teams as a list. Just as an example. So aside from that, you can extract information, kind of like a scrape, from websites and from, um, you know, information that's in your computer. So let's say you have dozens of Excel spreadsheets. Well, you can create an automation that extracts the data from all of them and compiles it into one single data source that then can be searchable or etc. You know, so instead of having to like merge or do index match which, hey, it's a lot of fun, sarcastically, to do index match, but it's useful. So imagine if you can kind of do index match across all spreadsheets in a folder and so on. And then of course you can do other types of desktop automation like launch applications that work together and create steps or workflows like open this website and put this data in. This is useful especially when you have to enter a lot of the same information on a form. So let's say that you open a form to complete some kind of request, maybe it's creating a requisition, and half of the fields on there are the same field, you know, your name, your username, your department, blah blah blah. You can actually have this automator essentially create a script behind the scenes. You just have to show it what you wanted to do, and it'll fill everything out the way you want it and stop at the point where you enter your information, and half the work is done for you. So how do you get this set up? Well, first things first, you have to download the Power Desktop. The other one is, is accessible if you go to, um, let me head over there. So this is what it looks like here. If you just go to Flow, because that's what it used to be called, flow.microsoft.com, and you're logged into either your work or school account, or you have Office. You have your, you know, you could have a personal account, you have a work account, or you can have a school account, and go to flow.microsoft.com and you'll see everything that you need right there. Down the bottom here you see what are called services, which is basically, think of it as apps. There's about 400, actually it tells you right there, 464 services. So those are all available here and in the desktop app, both, but this is the web app. So over here on the left-hand side you can see Um, the action items that are pending, if you have any— you won't until you start creating some. And then there's the My Flows. There won't be any flows when you start out, so you'll have to create a flow. But before you do that, I encourage you to go check out templates. If any of you remember If This Then That when it started out, and you can like browse through the templates based on the apps that you had. So you'd say, okay, I have Gmail and Excel, and then it would show you, you know, templates that have that. It's exactly the same thing you can do here. Basically, it's if this, then that, but there's no limits. You don't have to pay for it, and there's— you can, you can tie all kinds of things together. So browsing to the templates, you'll get some ideas on what kinds of things you can do, like approval workflows, data collection workflows, events and calendars, notifications. For example, hint, hint, wink, wink, you can have a text message pushed to your mobile phone when your boss sends you an email. That way, even if you're not in front of your computer, you'll be notified via text that there's an email from your boss or from a very important client or something like that. You can take data from Twitter and put it in Power BI and visualize it. You can extract data from all kinds of places and put it into a spreadsheet into other types of formats. So all of that is, is listed in here. Encourage you to explore it. But where you go to start is you go to Create. And what we're talking about today is just very basic introduction to the desktop version. So when you start here and you want to create on your desktop, you'll see that there's a tab that's called Desktop Flow. This is what's going to kickstart you setting up Power Automate Desktop— wow, that's a handful— in your machine. A word of warning: you have to have one of those three accounts— work, school, or personal account with Office— because otherwise, if you download the Power Desktop, you won't be able to initialize the Dataverse, which is like the database of information. And the second thing that goes along with that, whatever system you create the actions in, whatever, wherever, uh, machine, whatever computer you created in, all of your desktop flows get stored there. Your automated flows, so where you see here and it says, um, automated cloud flow, I'll show you what that looks like on my end here, or instant cloud flow. So the automated means it runs by itself, it's continuously looking for triggers. Instant means that you push a button And this is pretty cool because then you can use this with what's called Power Apps and make an app that you can use from anywhere that starts a particular workflow. Or you can have a workflow that runs at a specific time, like say every midnight, go grab the data from here and put it over there. But as I said, here's the desktop flow, and it's going to ask you to download the app, and that's how you end up here in this place right there. I think I know. Did I already have one? No, I didn't. Right, so I'm just gonna start one. I'm gonna call it example and launch the app. If you don't have it, it'll show you this download, get the app thing. You click on that and it'll download the, the app for you. So let's back up and look at what that looks like. It's basically just a download that's Microsoft.exe. Open that up and install the desktop, and then the next time you come back and click from Desktop Flow, you'll be able to basically launch the application directly from the website if you want to. I already have it installed. I'm just kind of showing you what it looks like. So I don't think it's gonna let me— yeah, I canceled that. Now once you have Desktop Flows, you will be able to save them under your My Flows. Here's your Cloud Flows that you create on the web. And here's the desktop ones. So remember when I said be careful with the account that you use? That's because if you used your personal account to create a desktop flow on your personal computer and you are on your work computer and you go to the same, you know, flow.microsoft.com, the desktop flow won't be on that system. It's system dependent, it's machine dependent, it's whichever one you created it in. So if I go to launch Desktop Automate— oh, there it is, Power Automate Desktop right there. This is going to be on this machine. You can import and transfer them to other machines, but you have to recreate the flow over there. So it does get you most of the way there, but you have to kind of run a little bit of the setup with particularly things like the browser extensions. There's the Edge and Firefox and Chrome browser extensions that you're going to need. And here's where you'll notice if you have multiple accounts, like you might have a personal one and a business one, you'll notice the difference between them and you can, you know, see if you might have installed something on your personal account and not your, your business account. All right, so now I'm going to go ahead and create a new flow and call it Example. And this is where it come, you know, you start the setup. So there's a link for setup, and then there's a link that's gonna take you to a page that walks you through how to create your first one. This is for desktop. And as you do that and you realize you're gonna do something that involves recording from the web, then you need an extension. So the recording from your own machine. So I'm gonna edit this one. Did I open it already? Did I or didn't I? Oh, yeah, I did already. Okay. I'm sorry, this is really small on the screen. I have a large monitor and I didn't realize how small it was going to come across. But if you can see, and hopefully you can, there's Web Recorder and there's Desktop Recorder here. So if you hit the Desktop Recorder, then no problem. It's just going to launch a kind of almost like a macro recorder looking kind of thing. So you can go to whatever file you were working on and you can essentially start the recording and it'll remember your clicks, what elements you select, what applications you're in, what actions you take. It remembers all of it. It's super easy to just do what you normally do and it remembers it, and then you can program it to do that action with a keyboard shortcut, for example. So you go about your, you know, fill out the form you normally would, it remembers everything. And then later you realize, okay, on step 7 I need to put new information every time. So you can remove step 7 and instead you can put in an action that says wait, and you can have it wait for a specific time, or you can have it wait for your input. You can say wait for input. Then when the flow is running, it enters everything up until where you need to enter something. You type in what you have to do and then click continue, and then it continues the the flow. Editing is super easy. It's just point and click, kind of like using a Word document. So that's the desktop mode. The web one is going to ask you which browser you want to use. So, um, it says in this recording, I want to use Edge, Chrome, Firefox, or IE. If you choose one of the first three— Edge is Chromium-based, so the Chrome extension is very similar, but you still want to download or install the one that they give you, these are listed on this link here. All 4 of the extensions are in here, by the way. But they're a little bit different even though the new Edge is Chromium-based. However, you still have to tell it which browser you intend to use. So if I'm going to specifically be using this browser, let's say that I want to download data from a— conference attendee list or something like that. Let's see if we can do conference speakers. I just want to find a keynote speakers or something like that. This is totally out of random. There's a list of business speakers here. Okay. Okay, so I want to be able to, you know, download this and scrape it and parse it or whatever. Then I need to tell Desktop Automate that I'm going to use the Chrome browser. And when you do that, what will happen is, see, under Advanced over here, it asks if you want to actually create a brand new— so do you want to start a new browser instance, or do you want to use an existing tab of one of the tabs that you have open? And the one that I have open right now that I'm showing you is the one that says Top Business Speakers. So I'm going to use that. And then— oops, I clicked on something accidentally. There we go. And then when you hit Next, it's going to go, okay, got it. Now I'm going to record from here. But I already have the Chrome extension installed. So if you have it installed already, that's what this is right here. It doesn't do anything by itself. It just allows you to be able to record from Chrome. When you launch this. From now on, if I hit, say, start recording, it will remember the actions that I do and it starts capturing that information. So you can say, okay, copy this information and then go over here and, you know, parse it. And you can see it's looking at the elements or inside of the HTML and it blocks them out so you can see which one you're hovering over. If there's links, you can click them, you can open the page in another page, etc. I'm not gonna do all this right now for you, but then it saves everything into that web recorder, and you can go back and click on any of these and change them. You can modify them, you can add, you know, additional details to them, etc. But it makes it super easy to essentially record activities right then and there on your desktop. So that's pretty much it for the introduction. I think there's, there's a lot of ways that you can use it, it's pretty much down to just your imagination, right? What is it that you do that's tedious? Think about what you do on a regular basis several times a day or several times an hour, or, you know, even if it's something you have to do every day but it's repetitive, it's worth investigating how you can automate that, how you can make that something that is part of your daily activities, and it just runs. So with the desktop, you can have it continuously run. And this was a brand new update just recently that came out in, in the, in the release that made it free for everyone, because prior to this, you had to be enterprise level 5, I think, to have it. But in the new release, they now have the ability to continue running the desktop flow even after you exit. So before, if you closed the Power Desktop— Power Automate Desktop, the flow wouldn't run if the trigger executed. Now you can actually set it to run even if you close. So it can sit there and wait for some activity to happen, like that you open a particular page and then it kicks in, or it can be on a schedule, like some form of routine, like every day at this particular time. Imagine if you could set Pomodoro timers that were specific, where it would give you a start timer, an end timer, a reminder. You know, like I said, the sky's the limit. If there's anything that you find yourself repeatedly doing, whether it's editing a resume or creating a job posting or copying and pasting data from one place into another because you have to track it in a different place, It can all be repeatedly done by the machine, by the robot. So I mentioned that I was going to show you a little bit of my desktop— sorry, my Cloud Flows, and that's kind of how I got into it. So if you want to practice with those, it might be a good idea to start with a really basic Cloud Flow to kind of get you thinking about what you can do and what's possible. With Power Automate. So let me just show you real quick a couple of examples of, you know, something that I, that I created. So right here— oops, I just realized when I say right here, you can't see what I'm showing you because I didn't share my screen again. Okay, there we go. This is what I meant by right here. This is a sourcing request. So when my team is asked to engage on a sourcing assignment, they have a form that they have to complete. This starts with the actual form. So technically, I guess I would need to, um, show you that first. So I'll show you what that looks like. And this is using Microsoft Forms. It's an online form. It can be done with cloud, and it can also be done with desktop. Here's the form. To create a sourcing request. This is the editor view, and it asks all the questions. This is what they— what the user sees. It asks them a couple of questions. They put in that information. This is the mobile version of it. When they enter the information, at the very end of it, they hit the submit button, and that submit button essentially is creating a, um, a approval workflow, it's called. It's basically an approval workflow, which is this icon here. So when the form is completed, it grabs the information from the form. That's what Get Response Details means. It grabs the information from the form, then it initializes a couple of variables that I need in order to send the approval. Then it— this is called a switch, which is a type of control— then it switches to the various departments for approval. It's— you don't need to know the guts of it. It's just basically this 6 different department heads so that they can receive the approval. Then, um, it sends the approval request and it waits. It gives them the information from the form and it waits for an action on the other person's end. This comes in as an email, but they can click on it and go to the item, or they can respond directly from the email. You have to have Outlook or Exchange in order to see that way. If you don't have Outlook or Exchange, it still sends the email. You end up just going to an email on your desktop, or, and then when you click on it, it goes to web. So rather than being inside of Outlook where you can do it, it'll take you to wherever, you know, to a web page. But if you already have Outlook or Excel, then it's, you know, they click, they approve, then it goes to the next level of approval, and then finally it executes an actual email into the, um, the, the person that's receiving the request. And that's the, my operations director that actually takes the request, and then assigns it to someone. So that's what the flow looks like. It grabs all the data and it puts the data into, as I showed you briefly here, these fields, right? And then goes through the whole process, sends it out. Then there's a second flow that kicks in, and that flow will take, take that request and it'll put it into a Teams list. So that goes into Microsoft Teams, and everybody that requesting projects as well as the leadership team can go in there and they can see different reports and different views of what that, what the activity is in the sourcing team based on that. So the form leads to the approval, leads to the assignment, leads to the essentially list creation, and that's an example of, you know, what you can do with, with this type of technology. Teams applications are built in, so you can do connectors here. I'll show you real quick. Connectors are the, like, the applications basically. So there's built-in connectors for everything that you can imagine that's, that's Office-based, right? Outlook, Excel, Word, SharePoint. But there's also RSS connectors, there's FTP upload connectors, task managers. If you're using Power BI to create reports that can be embedded into Teams, for example, you can have a Teams channel where people can go and see the reports and the data is dynamically updated from these flows. Um, let's see, Google Drive, GitHub, list management. There's literally a ton. It's 465 right now and they just keep adding Bitly automation, you name it. Now the ones that say premium, I just want to clarify, um, you— this is free, what I'm showing you is free, but some of these connectors belong to companies that create their own software. So for example, if it's, um, see one that you can— might be able to easily recognize— FreshBooks, like an accounting system. You either you have FreshBooks and then it comes with your account, or you have to basically subscribe to this, you know, kind of like buy this app. Most of what you need is going to be for basic stuff is going to be free because it's all inside of Office, but some of them are premium and they may just come included with— if you buy GoToWebinar and you already pay for GoToWebinar, for example, you already have this. When you go and activate it, I'll show you here, it's going to ask you to log into that system. So when you log into that system and it, and it authenticates, then from now on that connector is saved on your machine or your account. So it remembers that and you can create them. So even though it says premium, you may not have to pay for it because it may be included with something that you already have. Just wanted to throw that out there. All right, looks like we are right at time. Pretty close. Uh, checking to see if there's any questions in the chat. Don't forget the Leadership Bootcamp recordings. Sourcing Leadership Bootcamp recordings are available now. If you go to that srcn.co/leaders2021, you can get to both of the recordings. I'm not seeing anything. That is a question other than I can't see your screen. That's interesting. I did share my screen. Well, we'll fix that later. I can put some screenshots into the PowerPoint. Looks like there's no questions. Cool. All right. So next time we will get back and talk a little bit more about specific flows and some ideas on what to do with that, so I can walk you through creating one. This is really just an intro. And then we also have scheduled topics like the, um, iOS shortcuts, so things that you can do with your shortcuts. Still working on figuring out how to get my phone to broadcast here through, through Restream, so when I can figure that out, then I'll do that. And then routines for your robots. And then after that, I had a lot of requests for OSINT, so we'll be going into that as well. All right, don't forget to tell people about the show, and have a great weekend, everybody. Bye-bye.