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)

Why do we need UI actions?

Over time, countless applications for Windows were created, of which a great many still exist to this day. Microsoft itself has created excellent options for tailoring your applications with tools such as Visual Basic and Visual Studio. However, many of these applications are still not accessible via an API and have to be operated manually – also known as the human interface.

As we will see later in this book, PAD can work directly with numerous and widely used standard applications such as Office and Outlook, but it would be impossible to cover the wealth of different applications with dedicated actions. And that is the reason why the actions for UI elements exist. The term UI automation refers to the general capability of PAD to work with any application window and therefore remote control any application and control element.

To enforce this very general approach, the actions in this action group are correspondingly general and can be divided...