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)

Browser-based business applications

So far in this chapter, we have talked about business applications that are installed locally on a computer. Although there are many of these applications today, developing business applications for browsers has also become more popular and widespread. Of course, this also is related to the fact that many software products are developed and provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) by major manufacturers. These include, for example, ServiceNow, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, and many more. As a rule, these software products also have an application programming interface (API) through which all functions and data are available. In the Microsoft ecosystem, we have Power Automate as part of Power Platform, where a constantly growing number of connectors can be used, for example, to establish a data connection to the aforementioned systems and to work with them.

But sometimes, the possibilities of API usage are not available and data must be entered via...