Book Image

Democratizing RPA with Power Automate Desktop

By : Peter Krause
Book Image

Democratizing RPA with Power Automate Desktop

By: Peter Krause

Overview of this book

Whether you want to organize simple files or perform more complex consolidations between different Office programs and remote-control applications that don't allow outside access, Power Automate Desktop helps meet these challenges. This book shows you how to leverage this workflow automation platform by explaining the underlying RPA concepts in a step-by-step way. You’ll start with simple flows that can be easily recorded and further processed using the built-in recorder. Later, you’ll learn how to use the more advanced actions to automate folder and file management and enable Office programs to interact with each other. You’ll also get to grips with integrating desktop flows into other cloud environments and further enhance their value using AI. As you progress, you’ll understand how flows can run unattended and how they are managed in the Power Platform, as well as key concepts such as creating, modifying, debugging, and error-handling UI flows. Finally, the book will guide you to use Process Automation Designer (PAD) in conjunction with your frequently used desktop systems to automate routine tasks. By the end of this book, you’ll have become a Power Automate Desktop expert, automating both professional and personal tasks.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

What is PAD and what can it do?

To best understand the functionality of PAD, we will go through a few examples in the following subsections where PAD is ideally used.

Example 1 – automatic response letter processing

Imagine you are part of an organizing team at your child’s school and an event is to be organized at the school.

Someone in the organization team has already created a form letter in which all the parents of the students are contacted and in which the parents should indicate by ticking whether they agree with the participation of their child. All these cover letters now come back as Word documents and contain the student’s names, as well as a ticked box for acceptance or rejection in each case.

You should now generate an Excel list to create an overview of the acceptances and rejections. To do this, you would have to open each Word document and see which student it is and which box was ticked. This whole process is depicted in the following...