We’ll look at more advanced scenarios later (including licensing), don’t worry. Once you download and install Power Automate Desktop (PAD, for short), you’re ready to start building your automation. Since then, the software was refreshed and renamed Power Automate Desktop. It was previously known as WinAutomation, by a company called Softomotive that Microsoft acquired in 2020.

Power Automate Desktop is a Windows desktop tool that allows the designing, creation, and running of automated processes. You will need one instance of this tool to design and run your automation. It’s a free tool, as long as you possess a valid Windows 10 license. To begin our journey into all things automation within the Microsoft universe, we look at Power Automate Desktop. What is Microsoft Power Automate Desktop? In a way, you resort to using RPA when you need to “replace the human” while not rewriting the software or building custom integrations.Īnother aspect to consider is that many automation and “just insert magic here” requests are not the result of thoughtful consideration but rather a quick hack or fix by someone who grows tired of doing manual and repetitive work. To put it shortly, you need to build an RPA-solution when you might need to mimic mouse clicks, window drags-n-drops, repetitive tasks in Excel and Outlook, and similar use cases. A relatively new phenomenon is Robotic Process Automation (RPA), where solutions such as UiPath have been market leaders. Many things can be scripted and thus automated. Eventually, I started with PowerShell and continued working on Linux shell scripts on the side. BAT files moved to Unix shell scripts and evolved via Perl to a collection of “hey, let’s use awk/sed/grep/find” VBScript.

I’ve spent a considerable time during my career automating and scripting things. Thanks for reading my blog! If you have any questions or need a second opinion with anything Microsoft Azure, security or Power Platform related, don't hesitate to contact me.

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