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)

Power Platform and related services

In Chapter 1, we learned that Power Automate Desktop is a part of Power Platform. With this direct relationship comes a unique advantage that can be used in conjunction with the other members of the Power Platform family. In the previous examples, we saw that a UI flow connects to another application based on specific use cases, or browser automation is used to retrieve information remotely. By using Power Platform, this scenario of outbound connections can now be extended to an inbound scenario – for example, a UI Flow can be called automatically from outside and do its work. In this respect, PAD can close the gap between cloud and local networks and thus ensure an interconnected process flow.

To gain a bit more understanding of this concept and how all this fits into the Microsoft ecosystem, I want to explain what all this means at a high level. The following figure shows the conceptual structure of the Microsoft cloud:

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