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)

Using conditionals

Conditionals are used to ensure that a certain state is checked in advance before an action or a list of actions is executed. They are one of the basic concepts in programming and can be used to build a flow without programming knowledge. We already used conditionals in one of the previous examples where we needed to check whether a folder existed before we created one. Conditionals are commonly referred to as If statements.

To use a conditional, we need to drag one of the actions in the Conditionals action group onto the workspace. We can locate this action group at the top of the list, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 4.1 – Elements in the Conditionals action group

Figure 4.1 – Elements in the Conditionals action group

It should be noted that these actions, listed in Figure 4.1, must be used in a specific order and sequence. The following subsections explain how to use each action in context.

Starting with If and Else

In most cases, when we need to check a condition...