>> I can't honestly, I can't wait. We're so excited. I know that we always say that we're excited, which is funny, which is our default natural state for anyone that knows us. We are joined by Stephen today..
If you don't know which Stephen I'm talking about, he is the master of Power Automate, and obviously is being in the news today. We definitely recommend checking him out if you've not heard of him or seen him really evangelize the platform..
Welcome to the show, Stephen. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> Anytime. [inaudible] >> Tell us big announcements about Power Automate at Ignite a few weeks ago whenever Ignite happened..
This is the latest hot news, everyone is finally talking about this. Tell us about the announcements, the latest thing, etc. >> Yeah, absolutely. The big news is that Power Automate Desktop,.
You can actually download it. Get started without having any special licenses or really anything to get started. It's super easy. >> I love that because one of the huge issues I.
Know a lot of people have had with Power Automate is where do you go? How do you start? How much does it cost? etc. I like the fact that you are just bringing it to an operating system that happens to.
Have a billion people using it. They don't have to go anywhere special. They just use the tools they are used to, and believe you me, as a Windows Dev, I will tell you Windows [inaudible].
Has a lot of issues that we could automate. A lot. >> That's definitely true. That's the thing that excites us the most is, what we're saying is,.
Automation should really just be something that any Windows user should be able to use to improve the way that they're doing their daily work, their job, whatever it may be..
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There's a ton of things that people do that are just - Make Automate
Copying and pasting that you could just automate away. >> Yeah, I love that and believe me, you know who's going to be really excited? The Windows insiders. Of course,.We will tag them all and tell them all about it. Windows insiders you've been waiting for a new thing in Windows to show for years. This is the new thing. Go play with it, try it out,.
Test your scenarios, send feedback to the team. The team is so hypervigilant about feedback. This is coming from me who believes no one's hypervigilant about feedback but this team is really hypervigilant,.
So please try it out. Speaking of try it out, Stephen, do you have something to show us? >> I do. I have my desktop here. If we could take a look at that..
What I've done is I've, this is just my personal Windows 10 PC actually. It's not my work computer. I've just downloaded Power Automate Desktop onto this machine. What I did is I signed in using my normal Microsoft account,.
Actually my personal Microsoft account. What that means is when I did that, I didn't have to pay anything extra. The fact that I'm a Microsoft employee didn't get me anything special..
But I was able to sign in, and I created a few desktop flows here. Now what's interesting about this is, is these desktop flows. Because it's using my own personal account,.
They're actually just stored in my OneDrive. If I go to my OneDrive folder, there's this apps folder. You could actually open this up and see, there's now a Power Automate Desktop for Windows..
I can see the files for all of my power Automate Desktop flows are actually being stored in your OneDrive using your regular Microsoft account. That's one thing that I think is exciting. But the scenario that I like to show you is actually.
Just a really common scenario that a lot of people
Do where if I have an e-mail, and I want to send it to a few different people, but I don't want them to each know that I sent it to the other person..Maybe I want to get status updates from the people on my team, and there's a bunch of people that have not put in their status yet. But I want to really ping them and make sure that they do their status..
I could put them all on the "To" line or even the "BCC" line, but that's a pretty obvious tell that other people haven't done their work too. What I did is I just created this flow real quick, and this is a desktop flow,.
And really it looks a little complicated here, but I'll show you as it runs. All it does is it takes e-mail addresses that I just put into an Excel spreadsheet, and I'll just send an e-mail.
From Outlook using these e-mail addresses. We can hit a run, and if the demo gods are with us, it'll work. Whenever you run a desktop flow, you can actually see what step it's on..
You see it's opened up Outlook for me now. It's going to go and click on "New E-mail." That'll open up the "New E-mail" window in a second here. It'll take those e-mail addresses that I had pasted into Excel, put them into the e-mail,.
And actually just typed that full e-mail, and sent it out right there. I selected two e-mails actually in Excel, so it's actually going to do that same thing twice. But this is really the value of automation is,.
I'm not touching the keyboard. This is happening entirely magically in the background, automatically sending out those messages. That's it. It's really a pretty straightforward scenario. But what's exciting about that is,.
If I had 10 different e-mail addresses, I'd have to go and copy that 10 different times, tweak those updates, get them sent out. Maybe I'll accidentally miscopy the e-mail one time, and somebody will get two updates, that type of thing..
The nice thing about this is it really just automates the entire process, and we can take a look at what it looks like inside of the flow. The flow itself, it just gets the data from Excel. That's what's happening up here..
Then for each row, this is iterating through each of those rows inside Excel. It's sending the keyboard shortcut to create a new message in Outlook. Populating the "To" line in the e-mail,.
Putting the subject, I can change the subject. I just typed in subject because I was boring. But in reality, this would be something like please send status update ASAP, [inaudible] changed the flow and what it does..
>> This is amazing, and I think based on your demo, this is an unattended flow, right? For the audience [inaudible] difference between attended and unattended, would you be able to just explain that to them?.
>> Sure. Yeah. This is attended because I'm running this on my PC, and when I click this, I see it run. It runs, I see the windows pop up as it goes along. Attended means, I as the person that's running this, I watch it and see it as it goes..
Unattended flow would actually run entirely in the background. Maybe on a virtual machine inside of Azure, and in doing so, that means that I don't have to have these windows popping up on my computer while it's going. Unattended is really useful for those major processes that are.
Business-critical that you don't want to be interfering where somebody's PC as it's running. >> Brilliant. No, that makes perfect sense. There's going to be used cases for both of them, right? >> Yeah, absolutely..
For a lightweight process like this, this process only works right now at least because I put these e-mail addresses into Excel, and I clicked "Go." If I tried to run this unattended, it wouldn't work because.
This Excel file isn't open on a random VM in Azure. It would actually be a lot more work to make this process, which is pretty lightweight, work in an unattended VM running in Azure. Lightweight processes like these are really about copy.
And pasting between different systems, helping me out as a user. That's really useful to have that attended scenario. Where we are talking a little bit about, hey, this is free as a part of Windows..
These attended scenarios here, these are free as a part of Windows now. Unattended is a separate paid add-on that you have to pay for in order to get as a part of your business. >> I love this because there's.
So many scenarios where we have to do a repetitive thing, and it sucks. It sucks. No one likes that, and like you were saying, the chances of mistakes are, you're going to make them 100 percent of the time..
Anytime you're copying and pasting stuff from here to there, you're going to mess that up because clipboards are not that reliable and your memory is not that reliable. I so appreciate this so much, and I know we can think of 75 examples,.
Just Sarah and I scheduling people for the show. Exactly, right now it's this horrible thing that she has to do. She's like "Hey, are you still on? Are we still on?" >> That's such a good idea. We'll have you back Stephen..
I'll do this to schedule people for the show, schedule a guest, and send confirmation e-mails out. It was like when you asked me for the join link as well, I can totally do that. >> Exactly. [inaudible] You're invited on the stage..
Here's a join link, go do it. >> Exactly. That might be a case where it depends on what you're doing, but you may want that to run no matter what in the background, so that might be an unintended flow,.
Or if you just want to be able to come in here and say, "Hey, I'm going to send my reminders now" you can do that, and it's an attended flow, so it's really up to you. >> I love it..
This is so fabulous. We never let our guests go without assigning homework for the audience. What do you want our watching audience to know, and do today? >> What I'd love is if they go to powerautomate.com,.
And download Power Automate Desktop. Like we said, I'll repeat it again, this is now available at no additional cost for Windows 10 users. This scenario that we just saw and a whole myriad of other complex scenarios you can do by just downloading this,.
Running it on your PC, and you'll be able to start automating, so that's what I hope you do. >> I wish all our guests came on the show, ones we removed licensing.
