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)

Automate Your Desktop and Workstation

In this chapter, we will take a look at the huge number of actions that that are part of system management and that also have high practical relevance. Some of these actions that we will cover in this chapter are the following:

  • Actions for workstation management, including scripting
  • Files and folders
  • Computer peripherals such as the mouse and keyboard, printers, and clipboard

We will dedicate the first part of the chapter to the action groups that make the management of a system possible before exploring the possibilities in the area of folder and file management.

The last part deals with the automatic operation of the peripheral devices of a computer. We will create a PowerPoint slide deck to document the status of a local workstation. By the end of this chapter, we will have learned that Power Automate desktop (PAD) can manage all important aspects of the local computer and that this provides a powerful tool for folder...