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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:
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?
Recently I had the great opportunity of attending the Microsoft 365 Global Developers’ Bootcamp. This consisted of two workshops, each going through a series of activities around a themed task, developing applications for use with Microsoft Teams, and using the Microsoft Graph API.
The workshop for Day 1 was ‘Build an Emergency Response Solution with Teams and SharePoint’.
This workshop was run by Bob German, and it took us through a series of tasks to create a Teams app for coordinating the response to an emergency such as a natural disaster. It grew out of work done to help with the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami in Asia.
I’ve been having fun with Google Analytics this week😃.
Yesterday, I needed to add statistical tracking to our Digital Education Team blogs on the University’s hosted version of WordPress. This has previously been no problem (eg with this blog), but with the new blogs, it didn’t work.
I created a new Google account for the team with our non-Gmail address, and that turned out to be fine.
I set up a Google Analytics account for the team, and that all seemed to work too.
But when I tried to connect my Analytics account to the Beehive Pro statistics plugin in the blog, it couldn’t find the website listed in my account. It said there wasn’t a ViewID. I was able to authenticate the Google account with the plugin, but the plugin couldn’t find anything in my Analytics account to associate with it.
Here is a summary of the Google Analytics account structure:
Organizations: An organization is an optional way to represent a company, which lets you access your company’s product accounts (e.g., Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize), and manage product users, permissions, and cross-product integrations.
Accounts: You need at least one account so you can have access to Analytics, and so you can identify the properties you want to track. An account can be used to manage one or more properties.
Properties: A property is a website, mobile application, or device. When you add a property to an account, Analytics generates the tracking code that you use to collect data from that property. The tracking code contains a unique ID that identifies the data from that property, and identifies it in your reports.
Views: a View is (or was) a defined view of data from a property. Users are given access to a view so they can see the reports based on that view’s data. Analytics creates one unfiltered view for each property you add, and allows you to create more defined views using filters.
So, what could have gone wrong?
The first thing I checked was the Analytics account permissions, in case my plugin, although authenticated with Google, wasn’t actually authorised to do anything. But these all appeared to be correct: I had granted the default permission set of "Edit, Collaborate, Read & Analyse, Manage Users", so all the required permissions were there.
However, looking in the Analytics account, many things did look different from the various help and instructions available. They also looked different from my own personal account:
The Tracking info option wasn’t listed under Admin > Property.
There were no Views listed in the Admin panel, and I couldn’t see any way of adding one.
I noticed that the tracking code for my web property began with 'G-' instead of the usual 'UA-'.
There were a lot more interactions available for tracking
US President Donald Trump: He’s hacked, but is he fired?
I have no idea how the election will go, and I don’t want to comment on politics here, but I’ve just read a very interesting article about the Trump campaign site being hacked.
I resumed my progress with Microsoft Flow after a pointless side quest attempting to change my favicon in SharePoint. I had very little success there, though I learned a lot, but with this, thankfully, I am having better luck.
To get started, I watched some of a video course on LinkedIn Learning: Microsoft Power Automate: Beyond the Basics, with Gini von Courter. I’ve watched enough of these now that I find Gini quite calming and pleasant to listen to: it’s a no nonsense way to get back in the frame of mind for the Microsoft universe (which is like the Marvel universe, but kind of solid, unmoving and heavy).
As it turned out, this course was ideal for me, because I’d already set up a Teams group for my current project and Gini started off with adding Microsoft Flow to Teams. Being quite new to Microsoft Teams, I hadn’t thought of doing that before, but it does make a lot of sense and offers some useful opportunities worth practising.
This post assumes you have a Trello board (because who wouldn’t) and a Microsoft Teams group (and who wouldn’t want to cheer one of those up with a Trello board).
So here’s the Trello board I’ve created as the first Swiss cheese hole nibbled into my upcoming SharePoint project:
My Trello board, a thing of awesomeness that nearly keeps me sane in moments of SharePoint
And here’s the Teams group I’ve created for the same SharePoint project:
It says, ‘Welcome to the Team!’ That’s a nice start, I like that. Big improvement, Microsoft!
