Automate Microsoft 365 Tasks with Claude and Zapier (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Claude co-work can finally get stuff done in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and your calendar. So that means sending emails, booking meetings, uploading files, and a whole bunch more. In this video, I'll show you exactly how in three steps. I'm David, your guide today, and let's jump in. Now, if you've never connected Claude to Microsoft 365, here's how to do it. Open up the Claude desktop app and then click Customize in the left sidebar. Then scroll down and click on Connectors. Click the Add button in the top right, then click Browse Connectors. Now, you might see Microsoft 365 under the popular header, but if not, type in Microsoft 365 to pull it up. Click on the card that shows up and then click Connect in the top right. Sign in with your work account in your browser. That should connect you, but if it says you need admin approval, then your IT team will need to approve your access. Once it's connected, you can X out of here and start a new conversation. You can use Connectors in chat or in co-work. We'll stick with co-work for this, which means we need to choose a folder to work in first. Then you can ask Claude to search across Microsoft 365. This prompt is gonna search across Outlook for the latest emails that need my attention. As it starts working, you'll see that Microsoft icon indicates it's using the Microsoft 365 connector. This gives us a couple emails we need to respond to. With this connector, you can also pull data straight out of a SharePoint file. This prompt tells Claude to go to this Excel file in SharePoint and download the contents of it into the chat. A few seconds later, we see that table show up with the two original columns plus an additional column that Claude researched. Now this connector has been around a while, but what changed earlier this year is that it can now take action in these apps, not just read data from them. Here's what I mean. Back in your connector view, when you click on Microsoft 365, you'll see all the tools you have access to. We just started with read-only tools, but there are now a set of write and delete tools. If you don't see these yet, it means your company's Claude admin has to approve them. Now, one of the emails that we got back to take action on was from Henrietta, who's asking where the onboarding guide is. All she knows is that it's somewhere in SharePoint and she can't find it. Instead of me sending the link over by hand, I'm gonna ask Claude to do it. It now looks across multiple SharePoint sites and folders for that document and drafts the email. This one takes a bit longer, maybe one to two minutes, but it does find the document in the HR site and gives us a draft to send. Now, normally I'd review this and then prompt it to make edits. You should do the same thing. It is your name on the email after all, but when you're ready, you can ask Claude to send it. Now, sending emails always requires your approval, so make sure that you click the Allow Once button before you go check Outlook. Now, it says it's sent. Let's see what actually happened. Here we are in Outlook. This is the original email from Henrietta, and this was the response we just saw in Claude. Now, you might notice that some of the spacing doesn't look quite right here. That's an edit you should make before you send the email. Now, if you're gonna do this, make sure the documents you send are correct before you send them. Clicking on the Onboarding Guide, let's see what happens. Here we go, we've got the new Hire Onboarding Guide. So that's email. Let's check out some other cool things you can do. Now, let's try to book a meeting, and not just any meeting, a Teams meeting. We'll do it for 30 minutes with Henrietta on Thursday at 10 a.m. Now, just like with sending emails, you do need to approve creating calendar events. Do that by clicking the Allow Once button. A few seconds later, we see it's booked, and we can even open it in Outlook directly, just confirming we wanna go here. And after a few seconds, we see the meeting is set up, it's at the right time, and it's got a Teams meeting link. And hey, sometimes plans change, right? So let's try to move the meeting. And after another approval, you'll see it's moved to Friday at 2 p.m. Okay, so that's decent, but what about something a little bit more complicated? I'm meeting with a Kevin Cookie company tomorrow, and I need to do some research. So I'm gonna ask Quad to research the prospects that I'm meeting with tomorrow, create a Word doc with that research, and then upload it to SharePoint in a specific folder. Let's see if it can handle it. 15 minutes or so later, after a ton of tool usage, we have got our result. Now, the question is, did it make it to SharePoint? On the marketing site, we can see the new file. And just to confirm, when we click on the prospects folder, we see that file here too. Okay, guys, we got a problem here. This connector covers a lot, but it can't send Teams messages, and it can't handle attachments. So let's tackle Teams first with another connector called Zapier MCP. Zapier is also the sponsor of today's video. So follow along with me at the link in the description below. From that link, sign up for a free Zapier account, and you'll land here. You'll then create a new MCP server to connect to the apps you care about. Step one is to choose your agent. Normally, I'd recommend selecting Claude so you can connect all your apps at once. But here we only care about Microsoft Teams, so I'll click See All, and then click Other. Then you can click Add Apps, search for Microsoft, and then add Microsoft Teams. Here you can select the tools that Claude has access to. To send a message to a channel, just check the Send Channel Message tool. Click Connect to sign in, and then Add Tool to add that to your server. While we're here, let's add the ability to send email. We'll use this in the next step. Select Office 365, and then search for Send Email. Check that tool, click Connect, click Add Tool, and your server is ready. Now, to connect this into Claude, click on Connect. You'll click Generate Token, and then copy this link. Back in Claude, open your Connectors window by going to Customize, and then Connectors. This time, click on Add, and go to Add Custom Connector. Set this up as Zapier, and then paste in that server URL. Click Add, and your connector is live. Now, let's do the thing that the built-in M365 connector couldn't do, send a message on Teams. We'll just try a simple prompt to post a notice in the Teams general channel. If it works, you'll see the orange square of Zapier. That means it's using the Zapier connection that we just set up. And here we go, the message just hit the channel. Next up, email attachments. So when raw files go into Claude, they can use a ton of tokens. That wastes time and money. The answer to that is the Zapier SDK. You can get started with it with the link in the description below. Once you land on this page, scroll all the way down to the Setup prompt, and then copy it. Back in Claude, paste the prompt, but don't run it yet. There's some special setup we need to make this work, so head over to your profile, and then click on Settings. Click on Capabilities, and then scroll all the way down to the Domain Allow list. You have two options here. The first way is faster, but less secure. Just select All Domains from this dropdown list. But if you do need to lock down access, just make sure that these three URLs are added to your Allowed Domains list. Now we can run the prompt. Now, I found that this takes a couple steps, so let me walk you through it. First, if you get asked whether it's okay to set up here, just say yes. Then if you're asked to install an optional Zapier SDK skill, just say no. We're gonna go through the Express version of this. The next step is to connect to your Zapier account, so you'll get a question like this. The simple answer here comes in two parts. One, you're logging in, and two, it's a headless environment. Hang in there, we're almost done. The next step is to take the URL that it gives you and use it to log in. You'll get to a page like this. Just click Allow, and now the important part, you'll see something like this. Make sure you copy this URL, go back to Claude, and send it into the chat. It takes a few minutes, so be patient, but when it's done, it'll show you all the apps you're connected to, including Office 365. We're now gonna test if this process was worth it for this email. See, Johanna sent us a contract as an attachment that we need to sign. So let's get ambitious here and see what Zapier can do. It's a whole bunch of steps at once, so let me walk you through it. First, we're asking Claude to find that email I just showed you, download the attachment using Zapier, fill in my details, which includes my signature that's in this folder, then reply to the thread, attach the PDF, but provide the entire draft for my approval before you send it. And 15 minutes later, we get the document back, we look on page two, and my information is filled out, including the signature line. But the real check is did that show up in the actual email? We head over to Outlook, look at the draft that's here, and here we go, we've got the message. We'll double-click on the attachment, open it up, we scroll down to the second page, and there is our signature. So the built-in connector to get started, and then Zapier MCP and Zapier SDK for a little bit more horsepower. Links to the Zapier tools in the description below. I'm David, see you in the next one.