Microsoft Office for Beginners - Designer, Powerpoint, Excel & Power Automate

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to the course. My name is Richard Anderson, and I am your award winning instructor. In this course, we'll be exploring how you can use Microsoft Designer, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Power Automate in order to increase your overall productivity when it comes to Microsoft products. With awards in FS 100 companies and experience in Fortune 500 companies, as well as my experience in government boards, I'm sure that I can help you. Let's begin your Microsoft journey. 2. What Is Microsoft Office and How to Access: So to begin with, the real question is, what is Microsoft office and how can it help you? So Microsoft Office is a suite of productivity software, which has been developed by Microsoft. It also includes applications like word, which you can use for word processing, for example, you've also got Excel, which you can use for spreadsheet. PowerPoint, which we'll be using today, which you can use for meeting productivity and presentations, outlook, which you can use for e mail, and also personal information management, and so much more. It is widely used in both personal and professional settings for creating, editing, and managing various types of documents, and also data. So today, what we'll be looking at is how you can actually access the Microsoft products, and also how you can do that using the online service. You may already have it on your desktop But in addition to that, we'll also be looking at how you can actually use the Online Cloud in order to manage your data, too. So to begin with, all you need to do is to head along to your search engine, just type in in Google or whatever search engine that you may be using. And then from there, all you're looking to do is to just type in Microsoft, or even you can just type in office Office 365, if you want, and there you go. You can always type in Microsoft 365, or else you can literally just type in Office 365. The domain itself is office.com that's office.com. Once you've managed to locate it, the next thing you'll look to do is to actually go along and log it in. So if you already have a Microsoft account, such as an e mail, you can just log in using that. You may already have it in your office as well, so that's something you can do. We'll also be looking at how you can use power automate desktop, also, which may already be installed on your system. So we'll be looking at that So, once you've actually located it, you'll need to just head along to this wonderful bit here. And to explain the general layout, as simple as this. You'll find all your favorite ones all located here, such as Microsoft Word. You've got Excel. You've also got PowerPoint, outlook as you've mentioned there. You've also got one drive, which you can use to store your data. You've also got Microsoft team, so if you do want to collaborate with other people, that's something you can do there, too, and you've also got one note, which you can find here as well. If you did want to explore other Microsoft products, then what you can do is you can go to this little grill here, which is up here, call it a grill. You can actually just go along and find all your favorite Microsoft applications, which can be found here. If it's not listed there for any reason, then you can go along and press more apps. And then that will load this page here. And as you'll see, it will just come along and give you some great new editions which may not have appeared previously. So some great ones include designer, which we'll be looking at today. And also some great ones including to do, as well. And, of course, as you can see here, the Power Automate, which is the Power Automate application, which is available in Cloud form. However, what we'll be looking at will be the desktop one. So it'll be Power Automate desktop, which you'll find just by going along to Power Automate on your desktop, and you'll find it there. So we'll be back in the next section. 3. How to Create with Microsoft Designer for Increased Productivity: So in this section, we're looking at how you can use Microsoft Designer. So Microsoft designer as located here within your suite of products is this fantastic bit of software that you can use, which is powered by artificial intelligence. So in looking at that, what you can actually do, as you can see here, is actually bring your ideas to life. So if you're having a really great meeting and you're about to walk into some team meeting presentations or put huddle packs together for your team. Really great thing that you can actually do is to log onto Microsoft designer. So this will enhance presentation. So all you need to do is to click on Designer, which is here. You can find there once again just by clicking on the Grill. And then going along if you don't find it there on this section here, you can actually just type in Designer at the top here, and then it will appear like that. And then from there, just click on that there. Once you've managed to get through to it, it will load this page here, and from there, all you'll need to do is scroll down, and in particular, we'll be looking at how you can use generative AI for your meeting presentations. So all we'll do from here is we'll click on Generates, which is on Image creator. And once you've clicked to generate, the art here is of prompting. And one of the things that you will need to know, and you will need to pick up, if you will, as we go through this course is the art of prompting so that you can use it in your Microsoft PowerPoint slide. So all we'll do from here is we will type in what we're looking for. So I would always suggest using the who, what, and where. So in this case, we're looking to incorporate a bit of art. So I would always say include who, what, and where. So, as you can see here, there's some great examples, and it actually includes some prompts here already. So it said a simple painting of two deers with trees, traditional, and it said the style as well. So that's also something you can include if you did want it looking in a specific way, then that's something you could do as well. But you can talk in natural language, and what you're able to do is to generate these really, really great pieces of artwork, if you will, which you can actually take into your meetings and enhance your presentations. You can use it in places like Microsoft teams. So if you're sharing slides, for example, that's something you can do as well, or simply put if you're just sharing slides or if you're just having an in person meeting, for example. That's something you can do as well. So all we're going to do is we're going to type in who. So in this case, I'm having a meeting, and I really really want to convey a message of team leadership. And I also want to convey this message of people coming together to work in the office. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to write so who, which is a team. What are they doing? They are going to be working. And where are they doing it, they're going to be doing it outside in a park. So we've got a team working outside in a park. So that's your basis. If you want to build anything on top of that, then you can do that. You can add things like they should all be wearing suits. And if there's anything in particular, you might even say it be animation, Pixar style. There we are. And all do is Wall Press generates. And all we're going to do is we will wait for that to load, and hopefully that gives us exactly what we want. Remember that this is AI, so it may not come out exactly the way that you're intending, but either way, you're going to have some really, really great pieces of work. So as it generates here, we've got this great team working outside in a park. They should all be wearing suits, and it's got it as animation Pixar styles. We requested. It has actually gone ahead and made it exactly the way we want. I can actually go along here. It has actually created some really, really great cartoons, and it's exactly what I'm looking for. So in which case, then, all I'll do is I will go along and select the one that I want. So in this case, I'm quite happy with this one here, so I'll click on that, and then from there, I will press download. If I wanted to download all four of them, that's something I could do as well, as you can see here it's already downloaded. So if I did want to grab the rest, I could just download all four. In this case, I'm actually quite happy with the one that I've chosen, so I'll leave it specifically at that. And then from there, I need to get this image over to our Microsoft PowerPoint. So we're going to be exploring PowerPoint in the next section. 4. A Beginners Guide to Microsoft PowerPoint: Now that we have successfully got our wonderful image, we're going to go along to Microsoft PowerPoint. Microsoft PowerPoint is an online presentation software. You can also download it, and it can actually be installed on your computer as well. So all you need to do is to click on the Sites that's available here, so Microsoft Office 365. Just go along and click PowerPoint. Then from there, it will actually give you the options here for some really, really great templates and themes. In this case, I would always suggest just using the themes unless you want to create one from scratch, of course. There are some great themes that you can find here, which can actually speed up your presentation productivity as well. In this case, I'm actually going to go ahead and click this one here, so I'm going to click Create. Quite like to it. Again, you can pick anyone that you wish if you're following along there as well. And as you can see here, it gives us some really, really great options. We've got the general layout, so if you did want to make any amendments, you can always click on the image if you want as well. Then from there, of course, you can always just change that image, how you see fit. In this case, I'm actually going to go along and I'm going to delete all the additional images, assuming that we won't need them for this example and this presentation as well. So I'm actually going to go along and just press delete on all the options that I don't need. If you didn't want to do a bit faster, of course, you could always just go along whole control, as in the control button on your keyboard and then scroll down and then select all the ones that you're looking for, in this case, I've selected all of these, and then I'll press delete in order to remove them. And then from there, once I've pressed delete, let me just go ahead and press that delete button. There we go. So now that's gone, I've got these three slides, which is I'm going to use for our hypothetical meeting, and then I'm going to write team presentation. And if you're following along, you can do the same for the sake of your example there. I'm just following along. And then we can actually change our little subject here, and we can just write Team meeting presentation. We've got team presentation, and we can write team notes, and I'll delete the extra point there. There we go. And in the process there, we can actually see it's coming along quite well, and we can change anything that we wanted here. So we've got some bullet points. We can say meeting in three and 57, and I'll go along and I'll just update that there. And then of course, if I didn't want another subject heading here, little notes, we can actually say team coming together. At and we'll just pick a random location in Sweden at 3:00 P.M. At the City Center. There we are. So that gives us some really great points to work off of and we'll just write notes, for example, and we can change that around, and we can change it to how we see fit in this instance as well. So what we'll do is we'll change this part here, which is we can even call it project deadline and there we are. We're just updating that as we see fit there. And there we go. And we'll just say is fast approaching. You can update this to whatever you want for the purpose of example there. Is fast approaching. There we go. And we'll just call that news. There we go. And there we are. So we've got a really, really great start to our template here. It's already looking quite good. Of course, we can always change things like this if we did want to, as well, so you don't have to keep these images. You can just click on them in the press delete, and of course, whatever you prefer there, and there we are. We'll even just write coming soon, and we'll say new office equipments. And I'll just write coming soon, office equipment. And in this case, we've got team presentation and team notes. So we've got our great notes here. It's a basic presentation, which is about ready to go. All we need to do from there, if we did want to add some transitions to it, then that's something we can do it as well. We can apply that to all. So if we wanted it to morph or push or swipe, whatever we preferred there, so I'm going to press morph. I'm going to ask it to apply it to all of the slides. And you can actually see right at the side here. It's actually just put up a little star for us. That's Solace. It's actually applied those transitions to our slides as well. So this is going to make for a really, really great meeting presentation. And, of course, what we'll need to do next is we'll need to insert our AI art. So all we need to do is to click on the image that you want to replace. And then all you'll do is you'll go to change picture. In this case, I'm going to say from this device. And then I'm going to go to our downloads, because that's exactly where it went to. You can actually see our fantastic picture here, which came from Designer as so labeled. And then all we'll do is we'll click Open. And as you can see, it's already bringing this fantastic presentation to life. So you can see that we could actually easily use this in the context of our teams meeting, our teams presentation. I can even move this down a bit. Nothing is set in stone when it comes to Microsoft applications as well. So all do is, we'll move that down here, so we can see our lovely team, as you can see them all smiling away there. So it's now brought this presentation to life, and as you can see this lovely team sitting there smiling away. And now we've got these wonderful transitions and also this great slide deck, which we can present information on as well. So now we've got the basic layout of exactly how we're expecting our presentation to look. All we need to do from there is to go to file, and then we can go to Save as. And then from there, you can just go ahead and save it as, and then we'll go ahead and give it a name. So we'll just insert this name here. We'll tell it where to go to. So in this case, I want it to go to desktop, and then I'm going to give it the name of team meeting notes. And then we'll press Save. And from there, you can see it has then saved, and we've got this fantastic presentation, which is now ready to go, and it will be saving to wherever you've saved it to. So now that we've got this all set and done, we're going to be exploring how we can actually get this presentation up and running using Power Automate. But before that, we're going to be having a look at how you can access Microsoft Excel. 5. Microsoft Excel Hints and the Basics: So another great feature is the ability to open Microsoft Excel. Excel is really great for managing data. Specifically when it comes to managing numerical data as well. And that might be, for example, if you have some personal expenses that you wish to track, some calculations, for example, and we'll be looking at some very simple calculations for that as well, so if you were receiving an income, and you wanted to know exactly how much you were receiving across all your payments, for example, and that's something you could do. That might be a great tool for business. It also might be a great tool for your personal life as well, and we'll be having a look at that just now. In order to access it, the first thing you'll need to do is to click onto Microsoft Excel just at the side here. From there, you can go ahead and select blank workbook. Then from there, it will load, and it will bring you to this fantastic page here. And all you'll look to do is, first of all, give it a title. So in this case, I'm going to say, we'll call it income, and it will be personal and business income, in fact. So in this case, I'm looking at having a spreadsheet which captures our personal and business income. I deliberately left it across two columns here, as you'll see. And all I look to do is to give this fantastic bit of writing here a nice and wonderful home. So as you can see here, it's spread across two, but I actually want it to be one cell. So all I'll do from here is I will go ahead and I will go straight to the home button at the top here, and then I'll click Bold. From there, I will click this little grid here. As you can see, it says borders. And then I will go ahead and I will click all borders. So as you can see, it's already starting to do its magic. So all I'll do is I'll click Merge from there, and I'll click Merge in center. And as you can see the line in the middle had actually disappeared. I'll press Undo. And as you can see, there's a line there now. And then what will happen is as I press that, you'll see that it will immediately disappear. There we go. And now it's merged and centered. So this is now actually one cell, which is actually great. So the next thing we'll need to do is we'll need to insert our values. And also, we'll need to insert some of the names of the income that we're looking to capture, as well. So in this case, I'll call it business income one. And then we'll go ahead and call it business income two. And then we'll call this personal income. And we'll call that number three. So as you can see here, the columns are actually split. However, in addition to our business income one, business income two, business income three. We can actually have our values, which will show here. Next, I'll want to have a total for all of this income. So all I do is, I'll press total here, I'll type that on the keyboard. What I want to do is I want to capture the total number of all of these values here, which will be contained in these three cells at the bottom here. So all I'll do is I'll go ahead and give it a border, first of all, so I'll go ahead and put this outside border. Fantastic. Already looking really, really great. I'll go ahead and I'll also click to fill this color. So we'll go ahead and click this wonderful gray here. Very nice. I'll also want it to show as a currency. I don't just want it to be specific values. I want it to be a currency. So we'll be doing that in just a moment as well. So in this instance, I'm going to go for the pound simply in the United Kingdom. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to press ten, which will stand for ten pounds or whatever currency you're using. You can always change it depending on what you're looking for. I'm going to say business income 110, personal income, business income two, made ten, and also personal income three also made ten as well. So all I look to do from here is I will go for equals, then I will type some. Then I'll do bracket open. And I'm going to select all of these cells here. So these are the cells which I want to add up. So I'm telling you, go from B three all the way to B five, and I want you to add up those values. Then I'm going to press bracket closed, and then I'm going to press Enter on the keyboard. And as you can see, it's actually added up all three of these columns and given us a wonderful, wonderful value here. So all three of these roads have been added up, and it's given us this wonderful value of 30. And that's just the start of exactly what you can do in Excel. If you wanted to give it a bit more of a cleaner layout, you can go ahead and give that a border there. If you wanted to it usually does this, so it gives you a second column, you can press revert if you want to just go ahead and keep it as it was. And then from there, go ahead to the bottom here and do exactly the same thing, give it another border. And there you are, you can go ahead here and give this a border as well, and there you are. So the possibilities are endless. It's now given us this fantastic toll tool. We can actually see exactly what we were looking for. I'm going to go ahead and make this bold, so we'll stand out a bit more. And if I wanted to as well, so I didn't just want it to be the numbers here. I actually wanted it to be in a value. So if I wanted it to be in taller, for example, or in Great British pounds, then that's something I can do as well. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to press home. And then from there, what you can do is you can go along to accounting here. And then you can just select the one that's most appropriate to you. So if you're using Euro, for example, or United Kingdom Pounds, for example, you can go ahead and just press that there, whatever is most appropriate for you. In this case, I'm going to click the English Pound, so Great British Pound. And as you can see here, it goes ahead, and then it's given us the pound sign with it. And again, depending on the currency, you can go ahead and select that, so in this case, I've said ten euros, and it's now equal to 30 euros there as well, or if it was the US dollar, for example, and it was dollars that we're talking about, then it would go ahead and update that as well to United States dollar, as well. So that's how you would make all of these values into currency as well. So the possibilities with Excel are extremely wide and endless. So this is just one tip or trick that you can use when it comes to Excel. So, in this case, all you need to do from there, if you're happy and you don't wish to make any more changes or do anything else. You can go ahead and press Save as. And then from there, all you need to do is click the Save as to one Drive, meaning save that to the drive as in the Cloud drive. And then from there, you can see it loads. I'm going to tell it to go to desktop, and I'm also going to tell it what the name will be. I'm going to select. And then I'm going to press this wonderful name here, and we'll just call it doc and then we'll press save. And now that will save to wherever I've asked it to go to, and it'll be available there too. So now that that's saved, it will be accessible anytime. And of course, that's exactly how you get started with Microsoft Excel. 6. Training Power Automate to Open PowerPoint for Productivity: So the next thing you'll need to do on your Microsoft journey is to load Power Automate desktop. So you can actually find it just by clicking on Power Automate. You might find it right there, or else you can just type in power in your search and type in Power Automate specifically, and it will load it from there. So once you found it, go ahead and click Open, And what it will do is it will load this fantastic program for you. And as you can see, I've got some flows already. So flows are effectively automations, which make things so much easier when it comes to doing repetitive tasks. So applications or even documents that you might continually open. So rather than having to go ahead and find them in your desktop and do whatever you need to do, you can actually just go ahead and run a flow. So in order to do that, all you'll need to do is you'll need to click on new flow, which you can find here. From there, you'll need to give it a name, so in this case, I'm going to call it Open PowerPoint. And then I'm going to go ahead and click Create. So if you're following along, you can do the same too. And then from there, you can see it begins to load and in the background, if I minimize that window, you'll see it has a new window that says Open PowerPoints, which is exactly what we want it to do, and it's on the Power Automate software. So all we'll do from there is we're going to press the record symbol, which is here, and you can go ahead and click Record. It will load another window, which you'll see here. I'll move that to the side. Then all you're really looking to do is to click the record button, which you can see located here in order to start recording. So go ahead and click that record button, and then from there, it will record any actions that we do with our mouse. The first thing in order for me to open PowerPoint is to actually go to Microsoft edge, which would be my browser of choice. I'm double clicking on that Microsoft edge icon, and as you can see, it immediately loads this page here. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to double click on the window pane because I want it to be enlarged. As you can see here, it gives me the option to click in here. And it says, Wait for action. I'm going to type in office.com. And then from there, I'm going to click to confirm the action, and then I'm going to press Enter so that it does the search. And then from there, I'm going to click PowerPoint. And there we are. It's now immediately loaded that. And I'm going to press on the notes that I wanted to open. So I'm going to press image, which is here. And as you can see, what it will immediately do, will then open this fantastic slide show for us. So this is now loaded our presentation for us. So it will be a lot easier than having to do any of this myself. So all I'll do from here is I will click Done on Power Automate. And then from there, all I'll look to do is I will need to double check that it's working exactly the way I intend. So I'll be doing that in the next section. 7. Saving and Testing - Power Automate Desktop: So now we need to actually check that it's actually working the way we intend. So we're going to do is we're going to close the tabs just to ensure that is actually the computer doing it rather than me. And then we'll do is I will press the play button which is found here. And what it should do is it should replicate everything that I was just doing. I'll press the run program button, in order to run the flow, and all it will do is will minimize us. This is no longer me taking control. This is now the computer effectively doing the job for us. And as you can see here, it's now maximized the window as we requested. It's now wrote in office.com. It's now gone to PowerPoint, and also it should open our presentation, which is our team meeting notes. And it has now successfully done that. And this is exactly it. So it's now made life so much easier because I've now no longer had to go along and navigate all of those steps in order to get to this meeting note as well. So if I did want to simplify this down the line, that's something we could do as well. So that's a great example of how you can actually run this. Once you're happy, what you can do from there is you can go along back to Power Automate and just ensure that you've saved it. So go to file and then save. And then it will automatically begin saving there. You'll see the window becomes a bit grayed out, just confirming that it's actually processing the instruction and saving it, and once it's saved, there you go. You can actually close the window or press exit if you wish. And then that will be it saved there too. 8. Adding a Shortcut key - Power Automate Desktop: So once you've got the result that you're looking for, you can navigate back to this initial screen here, and you can select the one that you're looking for, on where it says, My Flows. We've called it PowerPoints, so Open PowerPoint here. All you do is you'll click on the three dots for more actions. And from there, you can click on properties. And under properties, as you can see here, you can add a description, which explains how your flow works. Just in case you're wanting to remember next time, for example, it's not necessary, but if you do want to, you can, if it helps you jog your memory a bit later. From there, all you need to do is press control, shift, and any other options as well. So in this case, I'll press H. It can be any set of keys. So whenever I press control, shift and H, it will therefore open the open PowerPoint flow. So that's exactly what we want. We want to automate this whole process. So if I needed to open that slide deck again, I could quickly and easily do it just by pressing control, shift and h. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to press save in this instance here, and it will save this action for me. So I don't have to have power automate open in order for that to happen. So all I'm going to do is press control shift in H at any time. You can always double check that it's working the way you intend. It should appear once again. So if you go out and back in, you can actually see it there, too. So, what we'll do is we're going to give it one final test to see whether it works without the assistance of power automate or in a demo setting. And we'll be back in the next section. 9. Final Presentation: So in order to ensure this is working exactly the way that we're intending, we'll need to ensure that our shortcut key works exactly as we are hoping. So in order to do this, remember that we'll need to press control shift and on the keyboard. That's control shift and H on the keyboard. Of course, if you've given it something else and you can go along and change it to whatever you want, it doesn't necessarily have to be that, but this is the one that we're using for the sake of this even be control shifting O for open PowerPoint or control shift and P for PowerPoint or whatever you deem it to be. So all do from there is we'll actually close this because we'll need to double check that it works without power automate actually being opened, so we'll close this window. Then we'll go ahead and press control shift and H H. And it should open Microsoft PowerPoint for us just as we are. So I've actually just gone ahead and pressed control shift and H And exactly as we're hoping for, it should now open power automate for us, and it should actually start appearing to do exactly what we're hoping for. I'm no longer in control of the mouse just so you're aware. This is actually all the computer doing that for us. This is Power Automate doing that all for us. So it's now going along and it's opening up the PowerPoint presentation that we asked for, and it should open the exact one that we're looking for, which was meeting notes. And it should go ahead and get to that one for us. Once it has done that and it's finished loading, we can actually just go ahead and press the present button, and that will allow us to present this wonderful presentation for us as well. I'll go ahead and I'll click Presents, which is here. And then that gives us this fantastic slide deck, which is here. It looks absolutely beautiful. And it is just one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen that we I'll play it once more. There we go. So this is a great example of how you can use these Microsoft applications, including Microsoft Power automates, we've also got Microsoft Designer, which is there, we've also used the fantastic PowerPoint application, which is there as well in order to create this beautiful meeting slide. We've also used Excel, which you can use in your day to day work or even your personal life, as well as well as your professional life. And these are some great examples of how you can use this in order to increase your productivity when it comes to presentations and meetings. And also when it comes to your personal life, such as if you're managing your own numbers and finance. Whether it's business as well, in year to add numbers for a department, or counting how many people are in a team, and you sent out a survey, and that's something you needed to get back in terms of the number of people. You can always go for equals some bracket open, select the number of colleagues, then bracket close, press enter, and then that will allow you to have this wonderful, meaningful data all in one place as well. So that's exactly how you'd use these wonderful power automate systems, as well as Microsoft 365 and all the applications attached to it as well in order to increase your overall productivity when it comes to Microsoft applications. 10. Congratulations : Congratulations. You reached the end of the course. You'll now know how to use Microsoft Designer, Microsoft PowerPoint, including Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Power Automate to increase your Microsoft productivity. All the best on your Microsoft journey.