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)

The parameters dialog

As soon as we drop an action from the Actions pane onto the workspace, a dialog pops up requesting us to provide information – the parameters dialog. The following screenshot shows the parameters dialog of the Get files in folder action:

Figure 3.4 – The parameters dialog

Figure 3.4 – The parameters dialog

This dialog shows the specific parameters for the chosen action. Since almost every action is different, the corresponding parameters dialog will also show different parameters. There are indeed actions that have similar parameters, for example, Copy file(s) and Move file(s), but these are more or less the exceptions.

The parameters dialog lets you enter all the necessary information that the action needs to be executed. This information can be text or numbers, the selection of a drop-down menu, a toggle switch such as the one in the previous screenshot (Include subfolders), and sometimes even more complex information.

Sometimes, the parameters...