The latest Jul 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 2.11.51.21196.
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 6 changes that comes with this latest version of Microsoft Power Automate Desktop.
Table of contents
- Launch of the Machine Registration App
- Automatic detection of Windows proxy settings
- Ability to remove unused UI elements and images from a flow
- New action ‘Take screenshot of UI element’
- Enhancement of ‘Convert datetime to text’ action to display sample of output format
- Enhancement of ‘Set Variable’ action to support multi-line text inputs
Launch of the Machine Registration App
The Machine Registration App allows users to perform mass deployment of Power Automate Desktop – from installation to registration of machines. Some of the actions that can be executed silently with this app include:
- Register machine
- Add machine to a group
- Change machine run environment
- Get machine information and status
To access the app, please follow the steps below:
- Open Start menu
- Search for Command Prompt (or PowerShell) and then run it as the administrator
- Change the directory to the Power Automate Desktop install folder, which by default is located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Power Automate Desktop
- Access the help menu by running the following command: .\PAD.MachineRegistration.Silent.exe -help
Automatic detection of Windows proxy settings
For those who are using a corporate proxy server and have encountered difficulties logging in, good news. Power Automate Desktop is now able to automatically detect the Windows proxy settings configurations, thus allowing connections to the cloud services that it requires.
Furthermore, administrators are now able to set specify registry keys to configure how Power Automate Desktop interacts with a corporate proxy server, to specify whether to bypass a corporate proxy server and to authenticate to a corporate proxy server using the current user’s credentials.
Ability to remove unused UI elements and images from a flow
Previously, if you have any unused UI elements or images, you will need to manually check that they are not being used in the current desktop flow, before deleting them one by one. Now, the contextual menus have been enhanced such that you can easily remove all UI elements and images that are not used within the desktop flow with a single click.
For the uninitiated, as a best practice, it is generally recommended that we should remove all unused UI elements and images to keep the desktop flow clean, and to improve maintainability and readability. So, this new feature will come in handy during “housekeeping” by eliminating the manual and tedious process of checking and deleting each UI element or image one by one.
New action ‘Take screenshot of UI element’
This new action Take screenshot of UI element allows you to take a screenshot of a specific UI element in a window. Previously, there is only the option of Take screenshot which allows you to take a screenshot of either the foreground window or a specified screen. Furthermore, you can save the screenshot either in the clipboard or to a file on your machine.
This feature can be very useful in certain scenarios. For example, when the UI element contains important information which we want to record or log for audit purposes.
Enhancement of ‘Convert datetime to text’ action to display sample of output format
The action Convert datetime to text has been enhanced to display a sample preview of the chosen datetime format, thus helping flow designers to visualize how the end result actually looks like. This is particularly helpful for users who might not be familiar with date formatting.
Enhancement of ‘Set Variable’ action to support multi-line text inputs
The Set variable action now allows users to provide multi-line text inputs easily. For example, to enter a new line, users simply need to press the Enter key. Previously, pressing the Enter key is equivalent to clicking on the Save button.
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 Jul 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: June 2021, May 2021, April 2021