Prelude
I met up with a friend and former colleague last week who gave me possibly the greatest compliment I’ve ever received. He told me the thing he respected most about me was I always came across to him as a common sense guy. He was my first ever hire as a manager.
It was such a great thing for him to say and it meant a ton. Hearing him say that and learning he believed that about me, I started to ask myself:
Why don’t I believe that about me?
So, right or wrong, I’m going to start believing it. To me, if I really am a common sense guy, I want to learn ways to solve problems that make it common sense to keep solving future ones the same way.
My goal is to demonstrate how to use technology to build common sense solutions to make our jobs easier and more enjoyable.
I choose to believe I will reach that goal.
So with that being said, over the course of four posts, I’m going to share how I built what I consider a common sense solution to automate managing my Dashboard in Day events, using nothing but Power BI and Office 365. It’s simple, it does what I need it to, and it takes seconds to set up for any future events.
It’s common sense to me that I do this for all my future events.
Part 1: Building a Registration Process
The first thing I did was use Microsoft Forms to create a form that allows users to register for an event. If you’re not familiar with Microsoft Forms, it’s a relatively new SaaS tool in Office 365 that allows you to, well, create forms with ease. It’s currently GA for Office 365 Education subscribers and in Public Preview for Commercial ones.
Below are the steps I took to create my form:
- I went to Forms.Microsoft.com, logged in with my Office 365 account, and selected New Form.
2. I clicked on Untitled form to create a title, add a description, and insert an image in my header.
3. From here I selected Add question, chose my question type, entered the question details as needed, and rinsed and repeated for each question in my form.
4. Once I had all the questions inputted, the last thing I did was change the theme to something a little more appropriate for my event.
And because Forms is a SaaS tool, I never even had to press save. From there I simply clicked on Share and I had a registration page with a link to distribute. And that’s it.
This was my first time using Microsoft Forms and I have to say I was really impressed. In addition to making it easy to build forms, you also get these features out of the box:
- A built-in submitted page
- Real-time tracking of responses as they come through
- Analytics on responses
- Export to Excel ability
My favorite part, though, is there is a Forms connector for Microsoft Flow! And there’s an included trigger that kicks off automation every time someone submits a response! This is the kind of stuff that makes me want a pop a bottle of champagne, folks.
So to close out my registration process, I built a simple Flow that sends the user a personalized email to confirm their submission.
To build this part, I navigated to the Flow.Microsoft.com and logged in with my O365 credentials. When I searched for Forms in the Find a template… search box, it turns out there’s a template already created that does most of the work for us.
Now we have the process built – we just have to connect it to our data.
First things first, I hit the Pick a form dropdown in my Forms task and pointed it to the Form I just created.
The magic of Flow is how simple it is to tell data where you want it to go. In this case, I want Flow to do the following:
Every time a user submits a response to my Form, send that user an email to the address he/she entered, calling them by name and confirming their registration has been submitted.
So that’s what I did. You’ll see in the clip below how you can map datapoints from earlier tasks into any task downstream.
From there I name my Flow, select Create Flow, and that’s it. Now, every time someone signs up for my event he/she will get an email from me confirming their registration. Users can even send me emails if they have any questions about the upcoming event, and I can manage my registration list in Forms.
Registration process built!
What’s next
The next post will cover how I used a SharePoint list to store the registration data and, without writing a single line of code, created a PowerApp to manage the event from my phone. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, how can you see yourself using Forms or Flow to help make your job easier?
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