The latest Aug 2021 update of Microsoft Power Automate Desktop has been released! 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 2.12.171.21216.
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.
In this article, we will go through 7 changes that comes with this latest version of Microsoft Power Automate Desktop.
Enhanced connectivity error messages in Console and Designer
Frustrated when you encounter a connectivity error and you are not quite sure how to troubleshoot? We’ve got good news for you.
The connectivity error messages in both the Console and Designer has been enhanced to provide more descriptive text to allow you to understand what went wrong, as well as the potential remediation steps which you can take to rectify the errors.
Examples of such connectivity errors include licensing, environments, software updates, sign-in issues and problems fetching or saving a flow.
New Excel action – ‘Get active cell in Excel worksheet’
This action retrieves the active cell in the active worksheet of the Excel document. It accepts an Excel instance as input variable (which is created when you use the Launch Excel action), and produces 2 output variables – the numerical value of the active cell’s row and column.
New Excel action – ‘Get column name in Excel worksheet’
This action accepts the column number as an input and returns the corresponding column name. For example, specifying column numbers 1 and 2 will return the column names “A” and “B” respectively.
(Not quite sure what is the utility of this action. If you have any insights, do let us know in the comments below.)
New Excel action – ‘Delete from Excel worksheet’
This action allows you to delete either a cell or a range of cells from the active worksheet of the Excel document. It accepts an Excel instance as input variable (which is created when you use the Launch Excel action).
If you are deleting from a single cell, you will need to specify the cell row and column, as well as the shift direction of the neighbouring cells, i.e. left or up.
If you are deleting from a range of cells, you will need to specify the starting row and column, the ending row and column, as well as the shift direction of the neighbouring cells, i.e. left or up.
Do note that you can specify the column using either a number or a letter (unlike row, which must be a number).
New Excel action – ‘Find and replace cells in Excel worksheet’
This action finds the specified text and (optionally) replaces it with another text in the active worksheet of the Excel document. This is similar to the Find and Replace function (or Control-F using hotkeys) in Excel.
For this action, there are a few options for you to specify, including the search mode (i.e. find or replace), whether to find/replace all matches, whether the match should be case-sensitive, whether to match the entire cell contents and whether to search by rows or columns.
Also, if you are finding/replacing the first matching cell only, the action returns the row and column index of the matching cell as output variables. On the other hand, if you are finding/replacing all matches, the output variable will be a list of all cells that matches the criteria.
Enhancement of ‘Read from Excel worksheet’ action
The Read from Excel worksheet action has been improved to allow you to retrieve data from the entire worksheet. Previously, you can only retrieve data from a single cell, a range of cells or the selected cells.
Enhancement of ‘Set screen resolution’ action
The Set screen resolution action now provides you with the option to select one of the available resolutions of your machine’s monitors. Doing so will automatically populate all the required resolution settings below.
Conclusion
The enhancements are not stopping here. Based on the 2021 Release Wave 2 Plan for the Microsoft Power Platform, there are a number of exciting new capabilities in the roadmap, including:
- Availability of Log message action in desktop flows, enabling users to log custom messages
- New integration module allowing users to work directly with the data stored in Microsoft Dataverse
- Create data loss prevention policies that govern desktop flows, as well as actions and modules in Power Automate Desktop
- Additional analytics capability in the form of admin reports for desktop flows across environments
- Improved and further integration of desktop flows into Dynamics 365 applications
- Availability of the 475+ API connectors as actions within desktop flows (currently only available in cloud flows)
Now that you have learnt some of the new features and enhancements made in Aug 2021, why not download this latest version of Microsoft Power Automate Desktop and starting automating?
If you’re interested, you can also check out previous Microsoft Power Automate Desktop updates: Jul 2021, June 2021, May 2021, April 2021