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)

Exploring Microsoft Cognitive Services

To make use of the actions for Microsoft Cognitive Services, we need to have an Azure subscription and provision a resource called Cognitive services multi-service account. In the following screenshot, you can see a ready-configured service:

Figure 10.2 – Microsoft Cognitive Services in Azure

Figure 10.2 – Microsoft Cognitive Services in Azure

Setting up this resource does not require complex settings. After this, the actions for Microsoft Cognitive can be used. Each of these actions expects a Subscription key. However, this is not the ID of the subscription itself, but the key that can be retrieved in the previous screenshot under Keys and Endpoint. Simply call this page and copy one of the pre-generated keys, and set it as the value for the Subscription Key parameter (or save the value as a variable and set it). Now let’s take a look at what intelligent services are available from Microsoft within PAD:

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