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)

Summary

This chapter has shown that PAD can integrate and automate applications that do not have an API. The ability to address systems with interfaces makes PAD a complete and self-sufficient tool for automation since, typically, in automation scenarios, both legacy applications and modern applications with interfaces have to be integrated. The actions presented in this chapter allow PAD to perform all tasks that would otherwise be covered by a cloud flow, such as including a web service, transmitting and receiving data, and further processing in a UI flow. This makes PAD quite suitable as the sole tool for small to medium integration and automation tasks. However, this can also become complex in some circumstances, as it is not possible to use a dedicated connector for a web application, for example, which can hide a lot of complexity. Furthermore, there are hardly any possibilities for scaling on a local machine with PAD.

We’ll take a closer look at how we can meet these...