Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 3 May 2022

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From YouTube: Run Office Scripts with a button - now in Excel for Windows

Description

In this 11-minute developer focused demo, Nancy Wang reviews Office Scripts, the new script button, and how to get involved in the evolving scripting journey. Scripts automate repetitive tasks and processes, and they are stored in your OneDrive for anywhere access by anyone with access to your workbook. Scripts are recorded and written in TypeScript/JavaScript. The new script button shown in demo is a first offering that works on Excel - web and Windows. Scripts are available in E3 and E5 licenses. This PnP Community demo is taken from the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform Community call recorded on May 3, 2022.

Demo Presenter
• Nancy Wang (Microsoft) | @nancyatMSFT

Supporting materials
• Try the Automate button – New workbook -Excel | https://excel.new/
• Program - Join the Microsoft 365 Developer Program today! | https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program
• Scenario - Office Scripts sample scenario: Punch clock button | https://docs.microsoft.com/office/dev/scripts/resources/scenarios/punch-clock
• Documentation - Office Scripts samples and scenarios | aka.ms/sample-scripts
• Feedback - Office Scripts @ M365 Developer Call | https://forms.office.com/r/0vP20FRKCN
• Resources - Office Scripts Portal | aka.ms/office-scripts
• Documentation - Sample Scripts | aka.ms/officesamplescripts
• Program - Office Scripts Makers | aka.ms/oscripts

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/m365/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/m365/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/m365pnp

A

Today I want to talk about running office scripts with a workbook button specific to excel on windows, but some of you might open this. Some of you might have been on this call before so feel free to you know throughout this. um If you have things that you've learned about office scripts over the past few months, past few weeks feel free to share that in the chat. I would love to hear that feedback. The three main things that I wanted to cover today.

A

One is: what is office scripts, two we're going to do a little demo of script buttons based on a sample that we got from a community member and then the third thing that I want to share with you all is how you can get involved, and so there will be a set of resources that we, as a team, could recommend for getting started with office scripts.

A

So this first thing is about what is office scripts and I guess in the room, I'm just curious to hear if anyone has used it before and if so feel free to drop in the chat.

A

How you would describe office skips to a fellow colleague or person on this call, I put in a little bonus challenge in there, but really just curious to hear how you would describe office scripts, because you know we, as the team have said something like many many times, but um I think that's there's always more interesting ways to talk about this feature.

A

uh But in terms of our mission statement for office scripts, it is to empower office users to easily automate tasks and processes to run businesses efficiently, anytime and anywhere, and so what this means is three different things. So, first, this is for office users and specifically for those that run businesses and so you'll notice that we're currently on the e3 and e5 licenses aka the education and enterprise licenses of office.

A

That's the first thing you should know. The second is that we allow for automation of tasks and processes, and so this is something that, within your spreadsheet, you're able to take any repetitive tasks and automate them into a process that you can supply anytime and anywhere.

A

And then this last thing about anytime anywhere means that, because this is currently a technology, that's on the web, you can run it from any browser. um Now, with this new update, you can also run it in windows, and then we can also run this anytime, which means that you can schedule this automation to run even if you're away through the power automate tool, and you can even schedule it to run on a regular basis.

A

So those are the three main things that you should take away from this mission statement, I wanted to kind of give a more concrete example of what office scripts is, since this is all very abstract.

A

So over here, you'll see a screenshot of what office scripts looks like today, you go to excel on the web, and you'll find us in the automate tab, you'll notice, that scripts are stored within your onedrive, and so that means a couple things. It means that they can be shared with others in your organization. It also means that they're not attached to the workbook itself, so you can access all your scripts within any workbook that you have in onedrive.

A

There's a couple tools that you use to create scripts, and so here on, the left you'll see the action recorder which allows you to capture any actions in your workbook and record it into a script for you, as well as the code editor, which allows you to create scripts and modify the scripts that you have recorded using javascript types of code, and so all of this together, you might be wondering well, like I think, there's a lot of similar technologies to this.

A

um So I did want to quickly go over the differences between office skips and some of these other technologies that we have today, including vba and add-ins.

A

So when we think about office scripts, it's really about how do we approach people that don't necessarily have a technical background or a computer science degree when we hop into the demo I'll show you a couple features that we have done intentionally to make this a little bit more easy to use whether or not you have that programming experience and then on this other axis, you'll see web and collab, which is about allowing people to share these scripts easily within the organization.

A

It's more specifically being able to accommodate for that web platform. I'm seeing some comments in the chat. This is great. Thank you, I'm going to address those after the demo. If that's okay with everybody.

A

As a recap, we have a couple core capabilities of office, skips um creating the scripts and excel in the web, being able to run those scripts in the browser and we'll see again that windows functionality, the ability to share scripts with other people and then finally, power on integration and being able to schedule and connect your scripts with other parts of the microsoft ecosystem.

A

B

A

I am seeing a question about science, signs of life to save office gifts on a sharepoint site. So yes, that's a really great question right now, as we mentioned before, office scripts are just saved in onedrive. However, we are looking into a way to share those on sharepoint as well, um first of all, because that would allow people to access more scripts, regardless of what workbook you're using, but also because we are thinking about. You know the admin scenario.

A

If someone leaves the organization, maybe there would be a way for them to preserve that script rather than having it go away when they leave the organization.

B

A

So I'm going to hop over to a demo now because we're running a little short on time, but I also wanted to welcome you all, because I noticed some of you are probably part of the m365 dev program or have that e3 e5 license feel free to try this out yourself by going to excel.new and selecting the automate tab feel free to do this, while I'm sharing or after the call we just love to get the feedback and I'm going to share the link to this feedback form as well.

A

This is gonna be super helpful for our team and yeah. Thank you, david for also sharing the links um separately. I really appreciate that all right, so what I'm gonna do next is I'm going to share in this documentation.

A

We have this new sample that came out about using a punch, clock button, and I wanted to first give a huge shout out to brian who is one of the people in the office gifts community who created this for us. um I figured it'd just be cool to see something that someone else created versus our team, and so here I'm going to show you exactly what that does and so you'll see that we're in the automate tab. I have all the opposites functionality here and what I'm going to do is.

A

Let's say that I am an employee who is clocking in and clocking out of work each day I clocked in about last week, and now I've decided that I'm gonna clock out and so the script that I'm gonna use is called punch, clock and you'll get the code from the sample scenario that I have linked here. But if we look into the code itself, you'll see that this is all based in typescript, javascript and I'll. Give you an example of how you can record scripts like these.

A

We have time for that during this call, but see if I run this script um you'll see over here that I've clocked into my shift and now let's say that I do want to clock out, but I don't necessarily want to go to the automate tab and have to you know, select these buttons.

A

Every single time so, with the new functionality, you're able to now create a script button within excel on the web, and so, if I run this, I would be able to clock out, but I want to show you what that functionality looks like on desktop, and so hopefully this will work.

A

All right so now I'm in the same. Hopefully everyone can see this I'm in the same workbook as I was before, and I'm going to switch tenants because I think earlier I was in the sample tenant. So now, let's say that I want to clock out of my shift.

A

If I select the script again, then you'll see that by selecting the button I am able to run the script and then that puts in that time for me um now one caveat about the documentation that they mentioned is that if this is any longer than or any shorter than one minute doesn't record the duration.

A

So maybe I should have waited another two seconds there, but you would also see auto-populated the duration of the script run, and so this is our first windows offering in excel for windows and so right now you're able to run the script when you have access to the workbook itself, and you also have the ability to view the script itself.

A

um So if I click edit here, you can see all the code at this point you're not able to modify anything but you're able to see what the code looks like and modify that create it create scripts and modify them on the web.

A

All right and with that, I'm going to hop back over to the presentation and while we're waiting for this to load I'll answer, a couple more questions carmen asks is this available for gcc uh government cloud. It is currently not. However, our team is looking into that right now, because we recognize not everyone has that e3 e5 license that I had mentioned before.

A

So that's a great question and definitely some feedback that we want to take back to the team and do we always need to create a table in excel to work on the script. The answer is: no. um You can even manipulate data without a table and that's one of the differences between us and power query. um So it's a good question as well all right.

A

So here's just a brief recap of what we touched on with the script: buttons you're able to add buttons through the web, and you run them within web and windows and that allows anyone who has access to the workbook to use your automation, something we didn't look at is that you can also change the color font and shape of these different buttons. So that's pretty nifty. If you want to customize it specific to your workbook, all right, I'm gonna, zip through this real quick uh in the next two minutes.

A

I'm just gonna show you how you can get involved, and in this I want to ask if you have a favorite office gift resource, so we know that we're pretty fortunate that people have created content for us. You know, like the sample that I just showed you, but also like on youtube and other sources of media really would love to hear how you're learning about office scripts today, if you have heard about it before, feel free to drop that in the chat. As for our team, we have two main links for you.

A

One of them is the sample scripts page, which shows you the sample scenarios that we looked at just now, but also a couple other examples, and I think david has the link to that so feel free to check that out on your own time.

A

But we also have this portal and you can think of that as kind of the home page for office scripts, where you can see what's new, as well as the link to some learning resources from our youtube account and last thing is that we would love for you to give us feedback throughout the year.

A

So this green room's uh or the link that you'll see when you select this, it allows you to share automation, requirements and look at the future priorities of office scripts as well as looking at some of those early designs of our investigation. So super helpful for us whether or not you use office scripts. We would love to hear about how you automate within office itself, and so this is just super helpful for us as a team and again this is the last slide of the presentation. I just want to give a really huge.

A

Thank you to everyone, because this is you know a new product and for us hearing that feedback about how we can improve is really what makes this work meaningful. So all right, I'm gonna pass it back over to you. Visa.

B

Excellent, thank you really really cool stuff. Thank you nancy. On that one, um it's good to see the progress and step by step. As always, we get more and more features and capabilities available, and it's great to see the the interest and the community involvement already at this point. So awesome stuff, awesome, awesome, stuff.