Microsoft 365 Community Office Add-ins, 12 Jun 2020

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From YouTube: Office Add-ins community call-June 2020

Description

This month's call hosted by Alex Jerabek covered two new developer tools including the VS Code debugger extension for Office Add-ins and Script Lab for Outlook, along with the new Chromium-based Edge WebView2 controller, coming to Office and a demo of the new integrations between Power Automate and Office Scripts.

Speakers: Courtney Owen, Sudheer Maremanda, Daniel Wilson

Resources:
Script Lab for Outlook https://aka.ms/AA8od2j
VS Code debugger extension https://aka.ms/AA8o5q1
Edge developer channel https://aka.ms/AA8o5q3

Stay connected
Twitter https://twitter.com/microsoft365dev
YouTube https://aka.ms/M365DevYouTube
Blogs https://aka.ms/M365DevBlog

A

Thank you very much everyone for joining us. This is the Microsoft Office add-ins community call. So where we talk about everything, that's new and exciting in the world of office add-ins and office extensibility. Today we're going to be talking about some new developer tools. You can use a new runtime that add-ins will be processed in and some new automation options from our sister product authors, scripts and power automate.

A

So my name is Alex Trebek Oh your host for today, I'm gonna, be joined by Courtney, Sudhir and Daniel to talk about the developer tools, edge, webview tool and office scripts I encourage everyone as we're going to. Please ask your questions in the chat we have members of the product team in the call that can help answer them. Anything we don't get to will be posted with a blog post following this recording or following this call, along with the recording of the session.

A

So if we don't get to you, rest assured, we will eventually all right so without further ado. I'm gonna turn it over to Courtney Owen who's. Gonna talk about the new added developer tools for us. So Courtney. Are you on the call I'm.

B

On the call, my name is Courtney Owen I'm, an engineer on the office platform, extensibility team and specifically I work on dev X features, developer experience features so over the last quarter, we've shipped a couple really cool features.

B

One of them is script, lab for outlook and I'm, not sure if any of you have experience with script lab, but script lab has been supported on Excel, Word and PowerPoint for quite some time, but we haven't had a support for outlook until well just a few weeks ago, and then the next thing I'll be talking about is the new debug extension for vs code. That allows you to debug task, pane add-ins in Visual Studio code, and you can develop and debug all in the same tool, something that wasn't possible until this extension was shipped.

B

So, let's start out with script Lab for outlook first, so I've got my outlook open here. I already have the extension installed. You see it here, script lab. If you want to install it yourself, you can just go into the extension store and I. Also, I want to give fair warning this machine that I'm demoing on is not the most robust machine. In fact, I ordered a new one yesterday, so things are not going to be as snappy as they might be on your machines.

B

So if I type in script here we see script, lab 2 outlook and you can read more details about what it does, but for those of you who are not familiar with script, lab it's a tool that was designed during a thing that we have at Microsoft called hackathon, where you can basically work on kind of any little project that you want to, and a few people got together.

B

I guess maybe to go and worked on script lab and what it allows you to do is to develop office j/s code to perform actions in office and to immediately see the results of that code. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to open the runner here, and this will probably be much snappier on your machine than it is online.

B

Okay, so that's open, so first I'm, just gonna show you I have a script already loaded and if you see this little tack here, this allows you to pin the task pane such that when I navigate through mail items, the task pane will remain open and pick up the context of the mail item that I'm in so here I'm doing.

B

Who is this mail from I'm gonna click this and it's gonna say as your DevOps when I go down here it remains open and it says it's from Lu and you can just keep going on from there now. Let's say that I want to do a new script. I want to create a office j-f script. That does something different. So then I can either go here and click on code or there's a button here. This is open code, editor.

B

Okay now see that's the previous script that I created who's this from, but we have a library of samples that you can choose from here and script lab for Outlook is supported in Outlook, read mode outlook, compose mode appointment, create mode and appointment attendee mode. So the samples here indicate what the mode is.

B

So since I'm in read mode right now, let's find another read script and see how that automatically loaded there and then I can go who's this and once again, navigate through here, and you can see this out office chasse is immediately executed in your pane here. So you can get I'll make a quick change. Just add a couple exclamation points.

B

And you'll see those exclamation points were picked up message sent to so it's a super fast way to test out your office j/s scripts, and this is new to outlook. This is also supported on the web.

B

So, if I go over to the web here, the UI's a little bit different for the web, just because the way Outlook Web Access works, and so here it's a flyout here and you do run and you can pin it just as you do in desktop once again who's this from this is from so that's our script lab for Outlook works, so we work on edge, Chrome Safari. We work on Windows, desktop Mac, desktop Firefox right now has a bug in it, not just for Outlook Script lab, but also for the other hosts as well.

B

So hopefully you guys will appreciate that and give it a shot.

B

So the next thing I'm going to move on to is the debugger extension that we just shipped to the PS code marketplace a couple weeks ago. So it has 217 downloads right now, which is pretty good, I. Think for a couple of weeks, I'll give you a little history on this. If you were to be developed in a add in testing add-in in the past, you would have too, if you were authoring it in vs code. You had no way to debug it in vs code as well.

B

You would have to either debug it online in chrome, dev tools or use this tool called edge, dev tools and doing so create a very disjointed experience. You had to hop back and forth between authoring and debugging.

B

With this new extension, you can author and debug all in one tool, so I'm just gonna quickly, demo how this works. I already have it installed here, but you can find it in store under if you just type an ad in it'll, be the first one that pops up. So what I have here is a little project, a same project, I created called koban tracker and basically it queries, active koba data and will show you a chart using office j s, we'll kick it off here and what this is going to do it.

B

This will automatically side load, side, load, meaning launch the host application register the add-in, and then it will automatically attach the debugger so I'll click this and I'm gonna go over to my code here and I already have a couple breakpoints set and we should see Excel launch in a second. This is where you're seeing the sluggishness of my machine, which I will play some elevated music. While this is machine.

B

Okay, so we've got my test fitting a didn't loaded there now I'm gonna go back to vs code, and this will attach in a second that were attached. So you see the progress bar stopped now I'm going to go back to the add in here, and so, if I can just sort of give you an idea in the past, I could have been coding this and then, if I wanted to bug it, I would either have to open this edge, dev tools and then pick this I'm not gonna open.

B

It now pick this covert tracker and then I could debug it that task pane Adam, but it required going back and forth between two tools. So here I can debug encode and what I'll show you is I can actually make changes and they're picked up immediately.

B

So I'm gonna get the data for the US.

B

So we hit our break point there. So now, if I hover over this you're gonna see undefined and if I f10 through it- and we look here data now we have the US data, so I'll carry on down through and I hit another breakpoint here and later on. I'm gonna change this to white the background to white. So you can see that I can author and still keep my debug session attached. So then we'll go through this again.

B

Okay by country and I'm. Going to change this to exercise should have changed it the first time around so.

B

Let's do that again, cuz see it just reloaded there.

B

Okay and now the other thing I'm gonna do is at runtime I'm, just gonna change the title of this chart in the watch window and I'm just gonna call it demo and you'll see that that watch setting gets picked up.

B

And we'll go back to the chart and we see that the background is now white and the title is demo, and so the cool thing is that I can author the code make changes at run time. If you have your dev server running it'll automatically pick up those changes and build automatically without losing your debug session, and you can do all the sort of standard debugging stuff that you used to so that's available in the store.

B

Now a couple of little caveats is: you have to run vs code as administrator and that's because we need permissions to be able to inject our debugging code into the edge process and then the other thing is that this will currently only work if you are using edge webview in the very near future, we're going to switch to using edge chromium webview, and so the debugger once that happens, will not be able to attach to the task pane process. We are planning on supporting that I.

B

Don't have a timeframe on when that's gonna happen, but we are planning to support edge chromium. We also have a tool which we were going to demo today. That will allow you to switch the webview from edge to edge chromium to even IE. So if you know you were running your webview in edge chromium, you still want to use this extension. You could use that tool just to switch back to edge if you're running edge chromium. So that's about all I have all.

A

Right Thank, You Courtney that will be demoing that webview switcher on the next month's community hall. There are a few questions for you if you have a second Courtney sure so question from Jack. Is there an ETA for the Mac office apps and will this support debugging projects built with bundles like web pack for react review.

B

Yes, so what this supports up currently right now, web pack and TSC typescript compiler, so what I'm demoing right now is web pack- and you know web pack, we kind of inherited this code from the edge team and one of the things that the edge team did not support was web pack, so I did a lot of work to get web pack support in view I'm, honestly, not sure if that is supported, I could check after this and see a second question about Mac I, don't envision Mac being supported in the very near future.

B

This the the code base is very Windows centric and that would require quite a bit of work that I don't see us having allocated at this point in time. All.

A

Right Thank, You Courtney. We also had a couple questions around other IDs or particular just visual studio. Well, there may be some plans to support those so.

B

Visual studio right now you can debug test paint add-ins that run in IE right now in Visual Studio. Currently, if you were running in IE webview in your test paint add in there's actually a little button that you can click. It says like open and visual studio. That's not supported in edge, nor will it be supported an edge chromium I believe so in a visual studio has support for IE I believe doesn't for edge. Maybe it will for edge chromium.

A

Alright awesome, thank you very much. Cool stuff script lab is one of our like most beloved things for Excel in word, so it's very exciting to see it now look and, as the Chad has said, it's great to see the the yes code debug or after yeah, oh wow, so Thank You, Courtney I, really appreciate your time.

A

Sure, okay, so speaking of the new chromium edge, webview, we're gonna turn it over to Sudhir. He's gonna talk about edge webview too, and the kind of future for ED and run times so Sudhir you're on the call yeah.

C

I'm here thanks Alex folks, thanks for being out here again, my name is Sudhir Meryem and I'm a program manager over here on the office platform. Team I am super excited to be here talking about the new chromium based edge web view to runtime for office Adan's. If you build a call over the past many months, you've probably heard me talk about the edge spartan or the edge webview, one control that we released I believe that was something last year. I think it was around April May time frame last year.

C

So again, we've been busy over the past a year year and a half or so working on the chromium version of the 1v2 and again we're here at this point, where I think we're ready to take that next step, but certainly need a bunch of help from you folks to make sure that your audience and your scenarios are working in this new edge webview before we can actually release this out to production. So just a quick history first before before I give you some details and how you can go in and help us.

C

First and foremost, these are the three different runtimes that we currently use on Windows or running your office atom. Of course you know an explorer or I didn't that's the default browser control on most of the Windows operating systems. Seven, eight and ten at this point for Windows 10 IE is the default runtime or the default web control at all windows version.

C

1902 I just want to point out that you were still seeing a bunch of launches using the IE runtime, meaning we still have a number users that are using Windows, 7 or Windows Windows, 8 or older versions of Windows 10 to launch office and then launch office add-ins on on those computers. So just just wanna want you to be mindful of sort of supporting those users and supporting those configurations with your for your atom.

C

The second one is, as I talked about the one in the middle: that's the the edge Spartan, that's sort of that sort of the the code name that we have internally or the edge with you. If you will, that's has been our default browser control with office 365. That version number that you see on the screen, as well as Windows, 10 and 1903. Again, that was the spring release of 2019 I believe and the one that's coming up right now, of course, is edge web view too.

C

The current plan is to ship this to all versions of Windows, so this this browser control will be available for all Windows 7 and Windows 8 and Windows 10 versions. So you will, you will have that available over there. Of course you will need the latest office 365 to be integrated with that control.

C

So as long as you have the latest and greatest office, 365 version and any version of Windows, if you will that has the web view to control, we will be able to support office add-ins on the edge of of YouTube and just as a quick note, because we have multiple of these web controls available to us. If, for whatever reason, a machine does not have, for example, the at the edge of you to about control, we will fall back to either the edge of a few one or twine or Internet Explorer.

C

If you will based on what's available on the computer, so your atom will still run I just want to make sure you understand that we will. We fall back based on the control, that's that the most up-to-date control that's available on that machine. Okay, so so just a quick tour I think most. If not all of you know about what YouTube cause. This is the latest and greatest Microsoft edge browser based web control. This is chromium based.

C

This is the open-source software based web control, as I mentioned, this is going to be consistent across all Windows versions. What are the cool things about this new browser? The web control is that this is going to be updated, are banned from windows or office updates, so as and when there's a new patch or or a fix or whatever it is in the open source software. We will ensure that that that fix gets out to all the computers are in the in the world as soon as possible.

C

I think there's going to be a bit of delay, but certainly we're going to minimize that that gap as much as possible and get this out of hand, windows or office updates it's going to be available across any application. For you, of course, win32 application or the universal applications on Windows, of course, are what we're talking about over here is purely the that win32 aspect of integration with above you to control and again, as I said last, but not the least.

C

This is something that's going to be always up to date, as in that is sort of the default setting for about YouTube on all Windows machines moving forward. Ok, so, let's see call to action. So this is this is where we are today as of right now we are not available in the insiders fast ring as yet, but we are looking to get there very very quickly, hopefully the next week or maybe a week and a half. This is the the version number that you'll see.

C

That's that's our day fork of office 365, the 16.0 13,000 one. That version plus will contain the integration with edge webview to being the runtime per office ends and again, that's only going to be available in insiders fast starting with about a week or a week and a half so just definitely keep keep on the lookout for it and as soon as that, that's available. Just remember that as long as you're in the insiders fast ring your office, Saturday is going to start running on the the edge webview to run time.

C

The way you know that it's running on the edge of a view to run time is, if you open the taskbar, if you don't have any browsers open, you will see MS edge, dot, exe being the process, that's running you're out, and if you will that's how you know that your add-in is running in above YouTube and by the way, that's just that screenshot that I have over there in the screen, showing a message: dot, exe Pete the process, that's running your office Saturday!

C

You will need to be part of it office, insiders I think most, if not all of you are already part of office insiders to get these bills. If you are not there's a link that I have out there for you to go in and join should be a fairly simple, straightforward process number two very important: you need the dev or canary channel of the edge browser so make sure to go out and get there I believe the link is Microsoft edge, insider calm and you can choose your channel from there and install the browser.

C

This is. This is very important. This is the only place where you will have the web control available. Do you remember again probably preaching to the choir over here, but you remember that the browser is different from the web control.

C

The web control is the thing that powers the browser, so you need the devil or the canary channel over here for that web control moving forward, we are looking to separate the web control from the browser itself, so you will I will likely be over here on this call next month or the month after, and ask you to download a different executable, a different process to actually get the web control, just sort of keep that in mind, but for now get the dev or the canary channel, and you should be good to go with with the new webview to control, but, most importantly, the third blood tests and validator add in test test auth tests all the the corner scenarios, if you're at in and give us feedback on this like we, we need to know that all of your atoms are working, as is before we we get this out to the production brings and, of course, that you have a github sort of an area over there for you, if you run into any issues or if you are into any, let me sort of problem running on edge web YouTube.

C

For your audit, if you can select the area, if you wouldn't mind just sort of either putting webview to the title of your issue or something like that, that'll just help us categorize it easier and better. Last, but not the least debugging I know: Courtney talked about a bunch of debugging I'll say a couple of things with the webview to you should be able to right click, inspect your avid right away right so right, then, and there so you open your task.

C

Pane, just sort of right click on your within your task, pane within your ad and task pane, and they should be an option over there to inspect, which is a great way to debug or you can get the latest Visual Studio 16.6, plus that that has the debugging built in or edge value to. Okay. So that's all I have again I. Don't I!

C

Don't have any fancy demos today, because really it's changing the engine, that's running you're added, so everything is working as this I will likely do a demo over to you next month with a couple of additional features that were working on from above you to standpoint or for now I'll pause and see. If there are any questions or comments on this yeah.

A

There's there's a question for context someone's asking: why is the browser and the web control separate.

C

Place the browser and remote control separate, so so a couple of reasons one is: we want to make sure that we wrap the web control much. You know in it and a different cadence than the browser. That's sort of one reason, because we there are a number of partners that the edge team has in terms of the people who integrate with their control and the requirements of those folks is a little different from the browser itself, which is why I think separating them seemed like the best direction to move forward.

C

So that's a this is that's one of the core reasons to sort of separate them number two. We want to make sure that the webview two is a core component of the operating system.

C

We can't force people to install the browser or the court force if you will, but certainly requiring what you two as a as a as a component of the OS, will be required moving forward, because there is their number of features that are going to be dependent on webview two as well as, of course, your scenarios like office items that are dependent on edge webview that make sense yeah.

A

Sounds great Thank, You Sudhir we've also had some questions around the manifest version. I know you're like one of the the resident experts on the manifest but discussion about. If there's a way to get the manifest version number through office Jas and doesn't sound like there's that today, but is that something we're maybe exploring in the future or is there a workaround that is.

C

A good question, so we've sort of switched gears to manifest, so you want to be able to get the version number of you're adding in the man in the manifest using some sort of an office. Jsapi I will have to take that feedback and and figure out how to do that. That is not something that we allowed to do using the office jsap as today.

C

Okay, anything else just cording through the questions that we hear Alex to see. If there's any anything else that I missed I.

A

Believe, that's all, but yeah we're excited to see your demos and upcoming calls and thank you so much for forgiveness sets up awesome. Thank you. Well, alright, thank you and yeah. Please please, please God and test for this new webview. If you find any issues raised on the office, j/s github, all of us make sure we don't break everyone's add-in when this rolls out in full. So we've been pasting links into the office insiders and edge canary build into the chat. Please get out there.

A

Let us know if you have any feedback or any concerns so up next we're going to go to office scripts and power automate. So Danny are you on the call.

D

Yes, I am thanks very much Alex good morning, everyone I'm gonna, be speaking a little bit about office, scripts of power, automate I'm, one of the PM's on that part of the product, and this may be a little bit of a repeat for anybody. Who's joined us at the MVP summit or build, but I'm gonna try to whip through some of this content and give you guys a little bit more of a forum for asking questions.

D

Basically, what we have is an integration for office scripts with power automate that is going to become eminently available in the next week, or two and kind of consistent with the overall office scripts mission of trying to empower everyone to easily automate tasks and run their businesses efficiently, anytime and anywhere.

D

The push towards integrating really tightly with power automate has been a really core component of our ability to like kind of dramatically increase the capabilities of office scripts beyond just the bounds of Excel, and it's been a real like core part of capturing this, like top right part of this program, ability and office matrix again, this may look familiar to some of you, but the idea that we're going for here is if common office web Adan's kind of cater towards what a lot of you guys may be available or may be familiar with as a developer audience.

D

It has a little bit more of an overhead. Definitely is a bit more on the complicated end of the spectrum is less likely to be accomplishable by somebody who has more minimal programming experience. Additionally, com, Adan's and VBA are confined only to the desktop, and so what office scripts has been filling for us is this sort of area of the solutions marketplace that is more approachable to end-users? It's a little bit less overhead to kind of spin up and get started in.

D

You can kind of imagine that this occupies his face similar to what script lab does for you guys and a testing capacity, but in a more formal and regularly usable way. And additionally, the web and collaboration part is something that is highly related to this whole power. Automate integration, and we also have a couple additional features around like simplified API and like script, sharing coming out. I'm gonna be talking less about those, and there may be some on the call who can address questions in those areas.

D

But the main thing that we focused on today is running office scripts via power automate. So again, the goal here is to really help our users to accomplish more with Excel and to interface with a whole bunch of other services beyond just what is offered with Excel alone, and this is gonna.

D

Allow you to really automate a whole bunch of like complicated and integrating intricate things that you would not otherwise be able to do, especially so in like scenarios where you might need to interface with outside data interact with other services etc, and some of these things may be either other Microsoft products.

D

Like Outlook power, bi teams, even non Microsoft products like Salesforce, Twitter and DocuSign, they really are a phenomenally high number of different connectors available on the service and it dramatically expands the things that office scripts is able to accomplish, and one of the things that we've also made like a fair bit of effort or put in a fair bit of effort to accomplish is we are able to accept parameters and return data.

D

So this really is like a full, deep integration with power automated, where previously the power automate Excel connector could accomplish like a handful of simple tasks. Again, this is a connector that did exist prior to this new eminently released upcoming feature. You were mostly only able to accomplish things like reading and writing data from a table and an Excel workbook, but as of a moment that this is released, which is gonna be sometime very soon. This will actually allow you to accomplish almost any operation that is possible via office J s Excel.

D

So that is gonna be a really really big deal and we are really excited to see what people can do with this. Again. It's a little bit more catered towards end users that are not able to build their own add-ins, but I'm actually also kind of interested to hear from you guys as to whether or not you see this as a potential like prototyping bench or even something that you might be able to build.

D

Your more formal end solutions, and so with that I'm gonna take over the screen fair a little bit and try to do a quick demo. Again.

D

I am kind of hedging by apologizing to anybody who has seen this content directly already as a part of the Q&A section, please feel free to request that I explore something kind of off demo, I'm, totally open to trying things out, showing you how things work, because this thing is basically ready to go out the door and it is ready for you guys to kind of play around with kick the tires on and I'm more than happy to do.

D

A little bit of that here in this call what I'm going to be showing you for this particular demo scenario is what are the things that we often saw with some of the customers that we talk to and putting this product together?

D

Is it actually seems to be a very common thing that our customers want to accomplish, or a very common scenario where some person on a team has some sort of status report or like to-do list or thing that they need multiple team members to go complete with in, like some given either regular cadence or some given amount of time, and there is a non-trivial time, investment necessary to actually track everyone that is responsible for a task onset, spreadsheet down and remind them to complete their task area, and in this particular case, I have myself and a fake version of another team member who have not yet completed their status report, and that might take a little bit of time to like get the fake version of our dear friend Frederick to actually complete but Baba scripts.

D

This becomes actually a very trivial and automated task. What I've got here is a script that allows you to basically get all of the people in this table that have not yet completed their report. I'm just gonna run it real quick for you and not focus on the actual logic, as you can see here. What's happened is the missing.

D

Rose values have been highlighted that a cell has been highlighted and the output is the actual name of the individual and their email so again trying to focus mostly on the power automate integration rather than actual logic. I'm gonna. Take you guys over to power automate, and here I can actually go to my flows.

D

Currently, this is only available as a feature in preview environments. This is what's going to be changing in the next two weeks and it's going to fail abduction, power, automate, set of environments. You do not have to create and set up a special environment in order to access the feature or you will not and in creating a brand-new flow. I'm, just gonna make a manual one and add an excel connector, as first action step now inside this Excel online for business connector, which is again something that has previously been available.

D

There is now going to be an additional run, script preview action and by adding this I, can actually find the location of the workbook that I'm interested in targeting since this is a demo. Tenant is just kind of top-level tasks, reminders, workbook and then I'm going to grab the scripts that actually want to run on it.

D

So here I have a get people script, which is again the one that we've just kind of run and what I'm actually trying to do here is I'm trying to accomplish automating this task of reminding everybody who wants to go or who needs to go. Fill out this spreadsheet and complete the status report cell to go do so without actually any effort, my part, so you might imagine that this manual trigger will eventually become some kind of recurrence trigger that happens.

D

Every couple of like days or weeks, whatever the cadence that you wanted to occur on, was and then also we need to add a step before actually sending out an email. So here I think I'm, actually gonna do teams card because that's another like cool integration. Email is fairly trivial, but the gist of what would happen in an email example is. You would just grab the send mail outlook connectors again.

D

And then, since this get people, scripts, outputs and objects containing a list of both the person's name and their you know, I can then just select from the dynamic content. Section users email. It knows power automate knows the fact that this email component is actually contained inside a list, and so it's smart enough to add and apply to each block automatically. Then I can say please status and say hi name, please etc.

D

As mentioned I'm gonna do the team's current version as well, and what that looks like is inside the Microsoft team's connector I actually have a whole host of different options, but one of them is I, am able to post an adaptive card to a team's user and wait for a response.

D

So what I can do with this adaptive card block is firstly, just like the email example: I can select the recipient. I'll automatically add the apply to each section.

D

Then, in the message section, this is actually where the contents of the adaptive card need to go and I need to figure out where I actually put the window that had my adaptive card in it went so. I may do that in the background as we're answering questions, because that's sort of a core component of the adaptive cards approach. Well, you might imagine the gist here. Is that there's a JSON blob that defines an adaptive card highly recommend checking this out if you haven't yet played around with them?

D

These are what adaptive cards look like, they're, defined simply by a JSON blob and rendered by accommodation, JavaScript, CSS, etc. They actually worked fairly nicely in email as well and a whole bunch of other different platforms.

D

What I was looking for is there's an adaptive card that I had in a window previously that closed and the adaptive card designer doesn't exactly keep cards around very nicely pick up a file on my desktop, but has it, but they play around very nicely with Microsoft teams as well, and they allow for submission of values and text, and so I have an example that allows you to submit your status report inline via the team's card without actually leaving Microsoft teams, and that is what this corresponding save response script does.

D

Is it accepts that team's card adaptive card response and then we would basically be adding one more step here in power automate that takes the output of this team's card and maps it back to the excel spreadsheet again through an office rips. So.

A

Let's look for that. Let's answer questions both in the chat here and through the questions middle forum about integrating car automate and office add-ins, so not just a office scripts, but the the adding component too. So if you could speak to that, I can send you your JSON thing through teams, yeah.

D

Absolutely basically I think what the questions asking is, whether or not there's going to be some kind of official or explicit integration between add-ins and general and power automate and I'm, not a hundred percent sure what the questions going for specifically because of the fact that there is the option for users to create their own custom connectors in power automate, and so, if you are an owner of an add-in building, an integration yourself with power. Automate is actually something that would be fairly easy to do for any developer.

D

Familiar with, like API is in general I. Don't really know what the questions looking for with regard to a specific one, but hopefully that is context.

A

Yeah I think we can yeah there. There is no like adding in particular integration, but there is a broader like you can make a custom connector for a service, much like how Trello has both an add-in and a connector or automate. You can make a corollary thing for your atom. Yeah.

A

Definitely hey!.

E

Alex Danny I think there was a follow up. Note on that question, which was around the scenario was around refreshing data. We're having your script called a data refresh operation that you're adding would go and fetch new data I think at least from a add-ins Excel add-ins perspective just off the top of my head. One thing you could potentially do is use excels calculation engine to do a refresh. So let's say you are doing custom functions and you you're bringing in data from your back-end through a JavaScript custom function.

E

You could create a script that really just opens the workbook and recalculates it on some sort of demand, so to speak. I think.

E

Try to check out yeah.

D

So we have not yet very deeply explored integrations between add-ins and office scripts. That's actually something we'd be interested to hear more. You guys on about interests in that sort of integration and like what possible scenarios you might think of. But here your example is an excellent one. That is absolutely something we might imagine people doing someday and at the moment you can kind of do so in an informal way where you like, recommends users creating an office script. Slash power, automate combo to like do a particular thing on a regular basis.

D

You might even be able to do so with a little bit of acrobatics on your part. Programmatically, as power automate does have a set of like management api's that allow you to on-the-fly create flow either for yourself or on behalf of the user. That said, they're. Definitely not that like tightly integrated at the moment and it's something that might be interested in changing the future and imperfect.

D

Does that answer what you're going for yeah.

E

A

Thanks you so Daniel in your team's, there is the JSON for the example and, while you're plugging that into the adaptive card in your flow, there were a lot of questions around blazer in the chat and Kari I. Don't know if that was addressed or not, or if you'd like to speak to that sort of support.

E

So I think for the moment our team's focused on building some great experiences using office javascript, and so what outside four blazer is we hear you? We actually think it's really cool technology and the best way to voice your need for that is on our user voice Channel, but I, don't think we have any imminent plans for a blazer support. Awesome.

A

Thank you all right, so Daniel yeah, now that we got the.

D

A

You talked to it.

D

Alex helped me out behind the scenes, thank you very much and was able to locate my corresponding JSON, so what I was actually going for originally is, as you can see right here in the designer, there is a update, your status report card and it's kind of a mock-up of what it might look like from a bot sending it in teams and, what's actually going to happen, is the Microsoft flow bot is going to send this card on our behalf, but like under its own kind of like bought account to whoever we actually indicate by email in this team's flow connector.

D

So again, here this thing is to find entirely by JSON. We can do some fancy things that we want to buy like modifying the message to include the person's name. That is all kind of up to us, and we can do that right here. So what I've done is I've pasted this JSON blob directly into the message field of the team's connector, and it doesn't actually need to be any real modification unless, like we feel like, we want it.

D

That type of modification might look like again, hi person's name but really beyond typing in hi person's name or adding whatever dynamic field you actually want to. All that's required is simply this email, dynamic field objects and the JSON blob defining the card here. I'm also going to modify the like update message to say thanks for your response and then should update card is going to say yes, because this is the question of whether or not after submission of some kind of info via the card.

D

Should you change the appearance of it or should you allow more submissions later in advanced options, I'm going to say yes, I wanted to be able to alert because I want it to ping and spam the person until such time as they actually have completed their report? That's part of the value here, I, don't have to be the bad guy. The flow bot can be the bad guy on my behalf and here I'm actually not gonna leave a summary, because it's since I don't leave a summary.

D

It's actually gonna, take the text and give it's like the short version and, for example, like a team's ping pop up in your top right.

D

So with that I think, there's only one more stuff that we need, which is inside the apply to each I, want to make sure to add an action that says called the run: script action again from the team's card or using the team's card response target the same workbook just in my onedrive for business in the top level tasks reminders, and then this time, rather than running the get people script, I'm actually going to run the save response scripts- and this is a good example here of a script that can actually accept parameter values.

D

So where the previous scripts returned an array of people, this one actually does not return about you and instead accepts value as its parameters before running. So here we know that the sender is going to be the person with a corresponding email from the scenes card.

D

I'm actually gonna just to make sure that there isn't anything that might get out of sync: try to use the output of the team's card, which is lagging on me a little bit, but we can grab the output of the previous action from the seems card here and use the user from that team's card. And then the message responds normally so I'm gonna stop trying to like mess with this demo, because clearly, I didn't take the records of time to set it up.

D

So I apologize to you guys on your behalf that you can't see this right in this moment, but I actually encourage you in the next week or two to go play around with it yourselves, because, whenever I figure out what silly thing I'm doing right here, that's causing it to fail whenever I figure out what that is, it's gonna work beautifully. This has actually been something that we are actively using on our team in multiple places and across a couple of other teams like Microsoft edge.

D

It's you, like handle status report, updates, send out like email reports automatically like ping people across like hundred person. Teams like this really is something that is actually impressively robust and like serves us very well, and a number of different real business case applications. So I'm gonna like hold off on this and stop trying to be optimistic about making this demo into working. Alex I do very much appreciate you digging this up and giving everyone a chance to see what this actually would have looked like.

D

If I was able to figure out the one thing that I just miss the step for.

A

Sure yeah here let me share something so Thank You Danny for that demo and presentation. This sample of automated task reminders through power, automate and office scripts will be on our office scripts documentation. Once the power automate feature or connector goes live. You can follow along with the setup instructions. Here's the script, that Danny ran to get all the data and then to add it back to the workbook. We have that JSON for the adaptive card and you can kind of follow along to see how to make your power automate.

A

This sort of long-form tutorial sample, here's what it would look like so yeah. We encourage you to check that out. I'll put a link to the documentation in the call and that will that sample will be live. We have our automate. So in a couple weeks, so real quick I'm going to go back to the PowerPoint deck there any other questions. We should do care anything that you answered that you want to speak to while we're switching here. Yeah.

E

I think there were a couple questions I'm around some of Excel API, so the there is a question from Andy or on. Are there application level events accessible by office Adams such as on workbook, open before we're closed? So so it right now for Word, Excel PowerPoint of like our API model is document-centric. We do want to consider a global application level model and because of the way our API has work, they're asynchronous it's difficult for us to essentially capture an event before that happens, but it is still something we're iterating on that.

E

We just don't have any imminent plans for for that scenario. Yet that's.

A

Yeah totally make sense. I know we also got some calls. Are some questions in through the submission form about that? Thank you for speaking of that. We also got a few questions about on, send so we'll make sure in the follow-up blog post to answer all the questions that have come in out of band as well, and anything we didn't address in this call. I know we're a little short on time. So, if we didn't get to your question, please paste in the chat. You can keep the conversation going after the call.

A

The video part is done so yeah. Thank you for that. So, as we wrap up, we encourage you all to engage with us. If you are working on add-ins yourself and want to present, please let us know we welcome the community to share what they've been working on to share your add-ins and your experiences so we'll paste this link in the chat but yeah akka, ms-office add-ins, engage. You can also give us feedback about our documentation and the other experiences you've had with the platform.

A

If you are new to office add-ins, please check out our QuickStart. You can get an add-in up and running in five minutes for Excel Outlook, etc. Go to a kms office, add-in stocks to find those and to learn more about the script lab so that we have that now for outlook, as we saw earlier from Courtney, but we also have the script lab for Excel, Word PowerPoint and, if you're into office scripts.

A

The the future Danny was showcasing check out the office scripting documentation at AMS office, scripts Docs, you can automate your Excel test there and we'll be having the power automate connected documentation coming within the next couple, vague corporate weeks. So, if you're starting out, we encourage you to check out the Developer Program there, you can get a tenant to start working with and developing on. So you can experience your add-in in a real deployed environment or script lab.

A

Then, if you need to engage with the community, Stack Overflow is where we to have you ask programming questions. Github is where, if you find an issue like with edge webview, we'd love to hear your problems there and help fix them, and if you would like a feature added to the product user voice, helps us prioritize upcoming, feature, requests and know which ones the community really wants.

A

We also have a whole host of other Microsoft 365 developer community calls, you know ones for teams for SharePoint all that there's a full list here and this link list will be in the follow-up blog post. I also saw in the chat. There was questions around. Will there be an office script specific community call, and that is something we're definitely considering for the future.

A

If we get enough engagement and desire from the community, we can split it off from office add-ins, but yeah, exciting stuff, send us your feedback and whether that's something that interests you and you know your needs. So thank you so much for that. We'll be posting a recording on our YouTube channel and following up the blog post later, if you have any other questions, feel free to stay in the chat and ask them. So. Thank you. So much for joining us this morning, yeah have a great rest of your week. Everyone thank you.