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)

How to use images with PAD

As we learned in the previous section, PAD can identify UI elements by using specific selectors. But there are situations where we need other mechanisms to perform certain actions, such as moving the mouse to a certain place and performing an action. This is where images come into play. We have the following actions that use images as input:

  • if image checks whether an image is available on the screen
  • Wait for image waits for an image to appear or disappear on the screen
  • Move mouse to image moves the mouse to an image on the screen

Combined with Send mouse click, it is even possible to perform actions without knowing the UI element. This technique is also useful if we need to automate on virtual or remote desktops where there is no agent available, such as Linux or Unix. Any program on any system can be executed and controlled remotely via this technique. So, for example, if there is a business application that runs on a Linux system...