The latest May 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 2.20.132.22123.
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.
Action Click link on web page is enhanced to support all click types
The action Click link on web page is now enhanced with an additional parameter Click type. With this option, all types of mouse clicks are now supported.
Do note that it is recommended to enable the Send physical click option (found under Advanced) for all click types except left click.
Enhancement of browser automation actions to support a timeout value
A new parameter Wait for page to load has been added to some browser automation actions, including Focus text field on web page, Populate text field on web page, Set check box state on web page, Select radio button on web page, Set drop-down list value on web page and Press button on web page.
When enabled, user can specify the timeout value in the parameter Timeout on webpage load. The default value for this is 60 seconds.
Action Extract text from PDF is enhanced to support structured data
A new parameter Optimize for structured data has been added to the action Extract text from PDF. When enabled, Microsoft Power Automate for desktop will detect the formatted layout in the PDF document and extract the text accordingly, all the while maintaining the structure of the tabular data.
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 May 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-may-2022-update
Previous Updates