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)

Understanding the potential of PAD by looking at an example with MS Office

Let’s take another look at the opening example, in which you were asked to help organize a school event as a parent council. This scenario looks like this:

  1. A school event is to take place and the parent council needs to obtain parental consent for the students.
  2. Letters have already been sent out to this effect and a Word document has been included. In this document, parents can check off whether or not they consent to their child’s participation. Afterward, the parents should send the Word document back to a specific email address. A document for this example has been defined and looks like this:
Figure 1.4 – Parents Letter document

Figure 1.4 – Parents Letter document

  1. You now receive a large number of emails, each containing the same document. A summary table with the consents and refusals must be created so that you can do further planning.

This is a good example of...