Discover how desktop flows can interact with your everyday tools and automate tasks, freeing up time to do more important things
Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook
Key Features
- Learn how Office programs can assist with automating recurring tasks
- Maintain superior work quality by including daily desktop and web applications in your flows
- Enrich your flows with additional AI-based information and integrate them with cloud systems
Book Description
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.
What you will learn
- Master RPA with Power Automate Desktop to commence your debut flow
- Grasp all essential product concepts such as UI flow creation and modification, debugging, and error handling
- Use PAD to automate tasks in conjunction with the frequently used systems on your desktop
- Attain proficiency in configuring flows that run unattended to achieve seamless automation
- Discover how to use AI to enrich your flows with insights from different AI models
- Explore how to integrate a flow in a broader cloud context
Who this book is for
Whether you’re a home user looking to automate simple tasks on your workstation or a business user or citizen developer seeking to automate more complex rule-based processes, this book will help you overcome the challenge. No knowledge of a programming language is required, but in the more advanced chapters, a general understanding of information technology, including basic programming language structures, protocols, and cloud concepts, will be helpful.
Table of Contents
- Getting Started with Power Automate Desktop
- Using Power Automate Desktop and Creating First Flow
- Editing and Debugging UI Flows
- Basic Structure Elements and Flow Control
- Variables, UI Elements, and Images
- Actions for UI Automation
- Automate Your Desktop and Workstation
- Automating Standard Business Applications
- Leveraging Cloud Services and Power Platform
- Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
- Working with APIs and Services
- PAD Enterprise Best Practices
Peter Krause looks back on more than 30 years of IT experience, during which he has experienced the entire spectrum from mainframes to client servers to today’s software as a service (SaaS) services. In 2003, he witnessed the birth of Microsoft CRM, = the foundation of today’s Power Platform. From that time on, Microsoft technology has shaped his professional life, where he has held roles in nearly every IT project. Peter is a certified trainer and works at Microsoft Corporation as a solution architect, where he helps enterprise customers successfully build their businesses in the cloud.
