Building Solutions with the Microsoft Power Platform

Chapter 9. Robotic Process Automation with Power Automate for Desktop

In Chapter 5, we took a look at Power Automate and how we can leverage it to automate business processes using services and connectors. In this chapter, we’re going to discuss another area of Power Automate that delves into robotic process automation (RPA). If you aren’t familiar with the term, RPA is the process of automating manual tasks that involve digital inputs. A common example would be a data entry process.

When I was in college I had an internship as a help desk technician, but I did a little bit of everything, including data entry. I would get a stack of printouts of services rendered and had to enter this information into a desktop application. There were no APIs that we could use or other methods for automating this. We just had to sit there and input the information manually. Today, a similar task would involve sending a digital file to an RPA solution, which would take care of extracting the information and entering it into the target system—no need for any code, or access to any APIs. We just record an example of us performing the process, and if the steps are repeatable, the RPA solution will handle the rest.

It’s pretty exciting stuff, and it’s quite easy to pick up. Think about all of the repeatable manual tasks that you perform on a desktop. Copying/moving/deleting files. Interacting with applications. Extracting information from forms and inputting that information into other systems. Any ...