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)

Built-in data handling functionality

In the final section of this chapter, we will look at other PAD actions that have been used repeatedly throughout this book and the examples that have not yet been fully explained. These very useful functions include date and time functions, manipulating text, and message boxes.

Date time actions

Of course, we also need functions within PAD to work with data, to create, transform, and display it. Some of these functionalities can also be found in the action group for variables, for example, creating a random number and dealing with lists and objects. However, there are also frequent situations, especially in the business context, where it is necessary to work with date values:

  • The current date should be saved for a quotation
  • The due date for an invoice is to be calculated 2 weeks from now
  • The age in days between two dates is to be calculated

For these purposes, the actions in the Date Time group can be used. Here we...