The latest Dec 2021 update of Microsoft Power Automate for desktop has been released! Yes, in case you’ve missed the news, Power Automate Desktop has been rebranded as Power Automate for desktop. In addition, Power Automate is now built-in with Windows 11 which is generally available. Today, we are going to highlight some of these new features.
To check the software version that you have, go to the Console and click on Help, then About.
The version installed will be displayed as shown below. The latest available version (as of this writing) is 2.15.282.21349.
If you have an older version and would like to upgrade to the latest version to enjoy the new features, go to this link to download the software installer. For Windows 10 users, you can now also download the desktop app from the Microsoft Store.
Here are the changes in this Power Automate for desktop December 2021 update:
- Unified web and desktop recorder
- Switch organization from the Power Automate for desktop console
- Create a copy of desktop flow through the Power Automate for desktop console
- New action Recognize entities in text that performs entity extraction
- Syntax highlighting in script editors
- New functionality to capture logical errors for the action On block error
- Save Excel workbook in the binary format
- New functionality to select Window or UI element for the action Send keys
- New Windows OCR engine type
Unified web and desktop recorder
The web recorder and desktop recorder are unified into a single recorder. With this unified recorder, you can now enjoy the convenience of recording both web- and desktop-related actions at one go.
Switch organization from the Power Automate for desktop console
You are now able to easily switch between different tenants within the same organization or across different ones using the tenant picker feature in console.
Create a copy of desktop flow through the Power Automate for desktop console
The Power Automate for desktop console has been enhanced to allow you to create a copy of an existing desktop flow directly. To do so, click on the More actions icon besides the desktop flow which you would like to replicate, then selecting the option Create a copy.
Rename the new desktop flow as desired and click on the Save button.
New action Recognize entities in text that performs entity extraction
The new action Recognize entities in text can be used to recognize entities from an input text that is expressed in natural language. Currently, 14 different languages are supported, namely English, Chinese (Simplified), Spanish, Spanish (Mexico), Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Korean, Swedish, Turkish and Hindi.
The support entity types include date time, dimension, temperature, currency, number range, number, ordinal, percentage, phone number, email, IP address, mention, hashtag, URL, GUID and quoted text. The extracted entities are saved in a datatable variable containing 2 columns – value and original text.
Syntax highlighting in script editors
All the script editors have been enhanced to support syntax highlighting, thus making it easier to read and maintain scripts. This enhancement applies to the following actions:
- Run VBScript
- Run PowerShell script
- Execute SQL statement
- Run JavaScript
- Run Python script
- Run JavaScript function on web page
New functionality to clear last error for action Get last error
There is a new parameter Clear error in the action Get last error. When enabled, the error value stored in memory will be cleared once it has been assigned to the variable. When this action is called again, it will now return a No error message instead of the previous error (assuming no new error).
New functionality to capture logical errors for the action On block error
Unexpected logical errors like division by zero or index out of bounds can now be handled by the action On block error. This comes in handy during exception handling, especially for business exceptions which often give rise to such logical errors in the first place.
Save Excel workbook in the binary format
The actions Save Excel and Close Excel have been enhanced to support saving of an Excel workbook in the binary format (.xlsb). For the uninitiated, the Excel Binary Workbook file (XLSB file) stores information in the binary format. Besides having a considerably smaller file size, the XLSB files can be read from and written to much faster than the other common Excel file formats.
New functionality to select Window or UI element for the action Send keys
The action Send keys now provides you the option to select which Window or UI element you wish to send the keystrokes to, even if that Window or UI element is not in the foreground. Previously, this action can only send the keystrokes to the application that is currently active.
New Windows OCR engine type
You can now specify the Windows OCR engine for all the OCR-related actions, in addition to the existing Tesseract engine. The affected actions include:
- If text on screen (OCR)
- Wait for text on screen (OCR)
- Move mouse to text on screen (OCR)
- Extract text with OCR
You may want to use the Windows OCR engine as it is a more efficient and faster engine, in addition to supporting 25 different languages.
Conclusion
By the way, the enhancements are not stopping here. Based on the 2021 Release Wave 2 Plan for the Microsoft Power Platform (last updated on November 24, 2021), there are a number of exciting new capabilities in the roadmap, including:
- Automatically scale virtual machine deployments by leveraging Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) integration to run desktop flows
- Availability of Power Automate for desktop to users of the new Windows 11 by default
- Save an Excel workbook as XML (.xml) file
- Mark variables as sensitive in Power Automate for desktop to mask data
- Users with accounts belonging to multiple tenants can switch between tenants within the Power Automate for desktop application itself
- Highlighting syntax within the script editor in Power Automate for desktop designer
- Unified web and desktop recorder for recording both their web- and desktop-related activities during a single recording session
- Support UI automation in Citrix environments for better reliability and resilience
- Create custom dialog action in Power Automate for desktop
- Create data loss prevention policies to govern desktop flows
Now that you have learnt some of the new features and enhancements made in Dec 2021, why not download this latest version of Microsoft Power Automate for desktop and starting automating?
Learning Resources
https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-automate-for-desktop-december-2021-update/
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