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)

Operating computer peripherals

The actions presented in this section complete the capabilities of PAD to manage workstations by simulating an operation or, of course, to cover other use cases. The following components can be controlled and can be found as action groups:

  • The workstation itself and connected printers
  • The mouse and keyboard
  • The clipboard

With these action groups, it is possible to simulate complete user sessions by moving the mouse or pressing keystrokes.

This can also be helpful, for example, when none of the previously discussed options (UI elements or images) are available to communicate with an application. Maybe we are not able to capture UI elements, but then we can still navigate the mouse to specific positions and send clicks or even keys.

However, at this point, we have to be very precise, and this is for the following reason. We will see in this example that the Send mouse click action works with the X and Y coordinates of the screen...