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Recently I’ve been working on a Power App for academic and teaching office staff to organise feedback on postgraduate dissertations. Microsoft recommend a maximum of 30 connectors per Power App, so I decided to pass the course codes to Power Automate, where a Switch action could be used to choose which course’s SharePoint lists to read data from.
This is how I had set that up in Power Automate:
The Switch statement compares the course code passed in from Power Apps with text strings providing the code for each course. It should match one of them and then follow that course of action. But it didn’t. The two seemingly identical strings didn’t match, and the flow ran into the default (matching none) condition instead.
When I was creating a demo Power App to fetch and display Dad Jokes, one of the challenges I faced was to fit the joke text inside a speech bubble graphic. The speech bubble was expandable, but only within limits, so I needed to keep fetching jokes and checking the length of their text until I found one short enough to fit inside the bubble design.
After clicking the button: the app enters the loop and the text changes to ‘Too long’
However, looping in Power Apps turned out to be tricky. Unbelievably, I discovered there is only one kind of loop in Power Apps: ForAll, which is used for looping over tables and collections. Power Apps really doesn’t have any other kind of loops, or even GoTos in the coding it makes available.
Making a While Loop in Power Apps
However, after much research, trial and error, I found a way to do this with just the loop (More Dad jokes) button and a hidden toggle:
This post describes a Power App that fetches and displays data from the Stack Exchange REST API using OAuth2 authentication, with a custom connector created by importing a collection from Postman.
Why did this happen?
This is a step in my ongoing project to access our Blackboard Learn Virtual Learning Environment using REST APIs. I thought this might be possible using Microsoft Power Apps, which would allow the development of apps more quickly, but getting the connection itself figured out was proving complex(*here’s why).
The first step in testing out this theory was my Dad Jokes Power App, which did not require any authentication.
Once that worked, the next step was to try the same process with another REST API that used the same kind of OAuth2 authentication process as Learn. After searching through various free public API lists, I found the Stack Exchange API, which seemed to match the authentication process fairly closely, and has good instructions too.
I also thought it looked useful in its own right, both for keeping up with news from developers, and for trying out methods for searching, sorting and filtering data when I got further into the Power Apps side of app development.
The Problem: How could I access data fields from a SharePoint Person column to display in another column?
I’ve been developing a laptop booking system in SharePoint and PowerApps.
As part of the Bookings list, I need to display data columns for the borrower’s name, user id and email address. This data is all included within SharePoint’s ‘Person or Group’ data type, however, I can’t access the Person data fields using lookup or calculated columns.
This post describes a Power App that fetches and displays data from a simple REST API using a custom connector created by importing from Postman. The app also uses a Toggle control to create a While loop in Power Apps.
I’ve recently been working on a project to access our Blackboard Learn Virtual Learning Environment more efficiently using REST APIs. It occurred to me that this might be possible using Microsoft Power Apps, which could allow the development of apps more quickly, if we could get the connection itself figured out. The Dad Jokes app was developed as a proof (or otherwise) of the concept.
A couple of weeks ago I discovered a University document called the New Learning Technologist Development Toolkit. And so I began a new project to follow it and develop my skills in Learning Technology. Obviously a project like this needed some way over the top organising… 😁
A while ago, I developed my own Microsoft Team called ‘Team of Me’, for organising myself and bringing my notes and notifications together in lockdown. This seemed like a good place to organise my training plans, so at first I created a channel in this Team to collect resources for this new project.
I began setting up a plan in Planner, creating lists of links, collecting PDF resources, making a few notes in the OneNote notebook and setting up some helpful Flows to channel messages into the right places, and cheer my progress along.
However, I soon discovered that the New Learning Technologist Toolkit, which looked like a short PDF, was actually a lot bigger than I’d thought. Everything it mentioned sent me down another rabbit hole of links and documents, and I realised it would need several channels in its own right to organise it all.
In fact, I began to suspect that becoming a Learning Technologist would take a lot longer than the 4 weeks listed after all. Who knew🙄. And so I decided to set my project up in a new Team of its own, which I’ve called ‘My New Learning Technologist Toolkit Team’.
The challenge now was to copy across the content I had collected and created in my original Teams channel into this new team.
Sometimes I wish I could caption literally anything. But at least since the move to home working, I’ve been wishing I could get live captions for online meetings and training sessions. I think transcripts are probably a bit too intrusive without consent, along the lines of making recordings, but live captions would often be so useful.
So I am very happy today, because I have finally found a way to get live captions that I think will work for anything with sound that plays in the browser on the computer. It was developed for Android first and so it involves installing a new version of Google Chrome called Canary, that is still in beta testing.
Downloading Chrome Canary: really liking the all-yellow version of the Chrome logo. I just know great things are ahead…
Visit this URL in the Canary browser where you can change the settings: chrome://flags/#enable-accessibility-live-captions
Enable live captions
Relaunch the browser
Switch on the Live Captions setting in the browser options (enter this URL to search for it: chrome://settings/?search=captions )
Search for Captions and switch on the Live Captions setting in the browser
You should be able to see captions whenever there are spoken words now. I can confirm that this works with Collaborate live sessions and video playback, as well as Teams meetings in the web browser (although the Teams Desktop App has better caption and transcript options of its own).
Testing out the Live Captions
The first chance I got to try this was in our morning Teams meeting…
So, here they are working in a Teams meeting in the browser:
Live Captions in Teams (Web Browser Version): Good to see them, though again, not perfect – if you have access to the desktop app, click the three vertical dots for better captioning options in Teams meetings. I look a bit goofy in the corner because I’m excited to see this working for the first time!
Here they are, working in a Collaborate video playback:
Live Captions added to video playback in Collaborate: They aren’t always right, but they definitely are there!
Here they are working in a Collaborate live webinar:
Screenshot of Live Captions working in Collaborate: looks fantastic, very useful! Is that Teams notification annoying anyone else?
And here they are working in YouTube:
(Which also has its own captions, but I’m including it as a demo)
Screenshot of captions in YouTube – in this case, very accurate too! Also, lovely guided meditation, courtesy of The Honest Guys
So, I really like this – thanks, Google!
Can we have slow down, rewind and replay next please? I thought at first, they’re not miracle workers – but I suppose with enough buffering they probably could.
And I wonder if it would work with Google glasses…
What can you do about old website URLs that are still indexed by Google? I received this question recently:
I was just contacting you to ask you about some of the links from my original website. When I put my name into a search engine quite a few pages from my original website come up like the news page etc and when you click on these it does take you to my new site with a page not found message. I was wondering what I should do about this, is there a way to stop these results showing? It isn’t too bad as someone could still go to the links and get to active pages but I was a little worried that it could send people away. I am hoping you may be able to help?
I’ve just spent an interesting evening attending a meetup / webinar called “Let’s Talk Content Design,” hosted by the UX Glasgow Meetup group.
Defining Content Design
Several speakers talked about this quote from Sarah Winters, defining content design:
Content design is a way of thinking… It’s about using data and evidence to give the audience what they need, at the time they need it, and in a way they expect.
