Extract data from a webpage and take a screenshot of a web page. Create a new tab in a browser, click a link on a web page and close a web page. PAD allows us to launch browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Internet Explorer. These features are helpful when we encounter automation where we need form-filling capabilities and need to automate applications on the desktop. PAD also offers us form filling functionalities including populating a text field in a window, pressing a button, selecting a radio button, setting a checkbox state, and setting up drop-down list values in a window. PAD lets you click a UI element in a window, select a tab in a window, select menu options, drag and drop UI elements in a window and expand or collapse a tree node in a window. Here is a starter list of 13 capabilities in PAD and summary descriptions of each: Capability
Our goal is to highlight real-life workflow examples where PAD can be very helpful so readers can see how easy and quick it is to get this same case study going on their own desktop or the web. We expect to be adding more such scenarios in the coming months, as we encounter new and interesting ones. PAD has more than 360 prebuilt actions, so we are not going to go through all of them.Īfter discussing the capabilities of PAD, we will dive into some scenarios where PAD might help you in the daily tasks that you perform on your computer. We will discuss each area and shed light upon some of the functionalities offered in each area that might spark your interest in the product. It offers a tremendous and growing set of functionalities including conditionals, variables, OCR automation, desktop automation, web automation, and more. Microsoft Power Automate Desktop (PAD) is a workflow automation platform that helps automate rules-based mundane tasks on the desktop or the web. In this white paper, we discuss the major capabilities offered by Microsoft Power Automate Desktop. Gartner defines this view as hyper-automation, namely “the idea that anything that can be automated in an organization should be automated”. Macrosoft’s commitment to RPA is consistent with the view introduced by Gartner in one of its recent analyses of the state of technology for RPA.
We have other papers in this series describing Macrosoft’s initiatives in this area, including a series of case studies of some of our recent projects built using Microsoft Power Automate.
We are investing heavily in the training and certification of our developers and data engineers in the full set of tools, but most especially Power Automate, of which Power Automate Desktop is one component.
We hope you will find this paper a down-to-earth guide to when where and how to use Power Automate Desktop to start moving yourself and your company in the direction of complete digital automation.Īs a Microsoft Gold Partner, we are ramping up our efforts across the entire set of tools in the Microsoft Power Platform, and we will be publishing many new papers to highlight this area of our company’s expertise. So, think of this paper as a simple learning primer on Power Automate Desktop for readers who have not yet worked with it or more generally have not yet engaged with robotic process automation. We describe the major capabilities in the tool and then show how these types of capabilities can be used in different types of process automation scenarios. Switching browsers is in many cases not an option for us.This paper is about Microsoft Power Automate Desktop. We are working with the latest version of Power automate desktop and the latest version of chrome. We have tried reinstalling chrome. We also tried opening chrome on the google launch page and move to the correct url after that. The error occurs on random moments but it seems to be happening more often lately. Furthermore, if you happen to close one of the open but not responding chrome windows, Power automate desktop fails because it cannot find the browser instance anymore. After that the flow can proceed, however it does present problems later on with focus window actions picking the wrong chrome window.
But this results in a whole lot of browser instance windows to open from which one (useally the first or second window to open) to out of nowhere repond. We placed the launch browser action in a retry when failed method for processes that are more critical. When we try to replicate the problem we see the chrome browser opening with the correct url but nothing happening after that. The error message reports an internal communication error and is therefore unable to take control over the chrome browser. The launch chrome action fails to start a new browser instance and is not able to proceed. We are experiencing problems with the launch new Chrome action in power automate desktop.