Happy New Year everyone!
The latest Jan 2022 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 2.16.215.22020.
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.
Nesting of multiple Excel instances under a single Excel process
Previously, in the Launch Excel action, each Excel instance can only be launched under an isolated Excel process, thus limiting the add-ins and macros which are accessible.
In this latest release, users are now able to nest multiple Excel instances under a single Excel process, as well as to load the accompanying add-ins and macros. In this way, these nested Excel instances will be able to reference other add-ins and macros which are previously not available.
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 Jan 2022, 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-january-2022-update/
Previous Updates