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)

How it all started – robotic process automation

The history of RPA started back in the 1990s–2000s. The need for user interface (UI), sometimes also graphical user interface (GUI), software tests became stronger at that time – that is, to be able to automatically click on a software GUI, enter values, and query outputs. For this, the first tools were developed that enabled the first UI and regression tests with the record-and-playback method. Screen scraping technology was also used for this purpose, with which the automation of extracting data from one application was made possible, to use these further in another place. The resulting automatic running process can also be referred to as a bot (the short form of robot).

Somewhat later in 2005, a company called Softomotive was founded that extended the concept of record-and-playback to enable workflows and data between different Windows applications and thus automate processes even across applications. The product...