🤖 How to use Microsoft Power Automate Desktop - Full tutorial

hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can use power automate desktop with what i like to call pad you can automate repetitive and mundane tasks basically the type of tasks that you would hope to never have to do as part of your daily job to help you understand what you can do with it i want to share just a quick example let's say that my boss comes up to me and says hey kevin i'd like you to transfer data from this one legacy system over here it's really old and i want you to transfer all of the data over to this other legacy system over here which is also very old now at first glance it seems like it should be straightforward enough but when i dig into it i start to realize that these truly are legacy systems and there are no apis and there's no programmatic way to transfer the data between these so it starts to dawn on me that probably the only way that i'm going to be able to do it is to manually go through and copy the data from one system and then paste it into the other system now at this point i'd probably start looking for new work but luckily with pad i could have the computer do all of this for me with pid i could basically go through and tell it step by step what i wanted to do copy this field over here and then paste it in this field over there it's kind of like using a macro in microsoft excel if you've ever done that before but instead of being limited just to microsoft excel you can write a macro across any application on your computer in a sense it's somewhat magical and extremely powerful we're going to start with how you can get pid then we're going to run through a simple example and at the very end we'll finish off with a more complex example just to help you understand the capabilities and what you can do with pid all right well why don't we jump on the computer and let's get started we're going to start off with how you can get pad but before we do that i do want to call out two caveats to be able to use pad you need either windows 10 professional or enterprise and you also need a work or school account if you have those you should be able to follow along with no problem to get started let's head to the website office.com and once you land on the website over on the left hand side click on sign in once you sign in that'll drop us on the office.com homepage down in the left-hand corner you'll see an icon for all apps let's click on that this opens up the all apps page and right over here on the right hand side of the page you'll see an icon for power automate let's click on that this will drop us on the power automate home page to get the desktop app over on the left hand side let's click on the icon that says create this will drop us on the create page and right up in the top right hand corner you'll see a drop down menu for install when we click on this we can install the power automate desktop app go ahead and click on this and run through the installation process down below there's also a second option for an on-premises data gateway what this allows us to do is when we set up automations in the desktop app if we want it to connect to any automations that we might have on the web we can use a gateway to create that bridge between the two for today's tutorial i'm going to look exclusively at the desktop app once you finish installing pad go ahead and launch the application and you'll land on the screen that looks like this in the top left-hand corner we can kick off a new flow and in a moment we're going to do that down below you can also see all of your recent flows this is where you can also run stop rename any of your existing flows in the top right hand corner especially if you have a lot of flows you can search through your list and here you could choose the environment where you want to view all of the flows or the environment for where you want to create a flow i'm going to leave it in the default environment we're now all ready to kick off our very first flow so let's go up to the top left hand corner and click on this text that says new flow this opens up a prompt and we need to give our new flow a name for this example it's going to be really simple we're just going to launch an app and then we're going to close an app i'll type that in as the flow name next i'll click on create this drops us into the pad designer and we're going to be spending most of our time here this is where we build our automations i want to orient you to the experience just so you understand what's where over on the left hand side we have a pane with all of our different actions and there are many different actions you can choose from in fact there are over 300 different actions an action is an instruction that you want the computer to execute on your behalf and just to show you some examples of what you can do here if i click into file you can do things like copy files move files delete files here if i jump into let's say web automation you can launch a web browser you could go to a specific website you could also extract data from that website here too up above let's say i have a specific action in mind rather than navigating through this list i could also just type it in so let's say i want to launch an app let me type in app and here i see an action for run application so i could run any application on my computer so once again you have a massive number of actions that you can choose from in fact if there's some step that you can take on your computer chances are you can turn that into an action once we start going through and we start selecting different actions that we want the computer to take it'll add them to the main canvas over here and this will show us a list of all of the different actions that we want the computer to take and once we start adding them to this list we can save it we could run through the list we could also stop running through it and over here we have two more different actions so over here you can go through and you can select different actions you want to add to this list or as an alternative you could open up the web recorder or the desktop recorder what this will do is when the recorder opens you can click on different buttons on your screen you can navigate to different places on your computer and it'll record all of those different steps that you take so it's an alternative to going through and selecting actions on this menu over on the right hand side there are three additional panes we have variables right here you can pass in variables into your flow that you create you could also get output back from this flow you also have something called flow variables and as we start building our very first flow we'll see exactly how this works down below you also have different ui elements these are basically things that you're clicking on on the screen as we go through the example we'll pull in some ui elements and you can see how this works down below you also have images and if you capture any images as part of your flow you'll see them here all right well now that we've walked through the basic interface here it's time to start pulling together our first flow for the very first flow we're going to keep it pretty simple i want to launch excel then we'll show a message box and then we'll close excel just to show you just the basics of how pad works over on the left hand side we want to choose an action that launches excel here i see a category for excel so i'll expand that and one of the first options here is to launch excel so here i can click on that and i can drag it over onto the canvas and here you'll see that my first step is launching excel this opens up a prompt where i could specify exactly how i want it to open so i could have it launched with a blank document or i could choose an existing document i wanted to open a blank document so i'll choose the first option here i could also decide whether i want the instance to be visible or not so do i want excel to open so i can see the window or do i want it to stay in the background for now just because this is a simple example let's leave it so it's set to visible down below i also see that it's going to produce a variable called excel instance so if i want to reference back this open instance of excel i can reference that variable so this will add our very first flow variable over here on the right hand side everything looks good here so i'll click on save back on the canvas now we see our first step for launch excel and once again i now have my flow variable with the excel instance so excel is going to launch and why don't we click on run just to see how this works i'll click on run this will now start executing my flow and as we can see that launched excel so look at that we we have our first flow taking shape as the next step in this flow i want to show a message prompt so over here on the left hand side once again i could navigate through here and find a display message or i could go up here to search and let me just type in message right down here i see that i can display a message now i can click on this action and i can drag it over to the canvas you'll see this line appears and that denotes the place where i'm going to put it in this list so i could place it after launching excel or i could place it before launching excel i want to place it afterwards so i'll release it right there and now i can type in the details of my display message let me go ahead and i'll type in a title and a message to display i just typed in the message box title launched excel and for the message to display you successfully launched excel here i could go through and i could select different details of this message box but all of this looks fine so i'll leave it as is down below here i'll also see that it's producing another variable or another flow variable and this is whether the button was pressed now display messages it's not really that useful in this scenario i'm just launching excel then i'm showing a message but you can use display messages if let's say you want to see the value of a flow variable or an input or output variable as you're running your flow these display messages can be very useful for that so i typed in all the details here let's now click save now i have both of my steps and once again i can click on run to see what it looks like here i see excel launches and then i get a message telling me that it launched excel and great it looks like it was successful back in the main designer i now want to add another step where i close excel back over here in actions i can click on excel expand that and i see the option to close excel i can click on this action and pull it over into the main canvas now once again we see that line there and i can choose where i want this action to take place in the flow now i wouldn't want it to happen before i launch excel it only makes sense at the end so i'll drop it right down here this opens up a prompt where i could specify how i want to close excel and at the very top it says excel instance basically which instance of excel do i want to close now remember earlier on when we originally launched excel it generated an excel instance flow variable here we specify that variable here so whatever variable is produced in the first step here we're referring back to that variable right here so we're going to close the same instance that we opened at the beginning down below i could also indicate how i want it to close and for now i'll just say do not save document but i could also save the document if i'd like to all of this looks good so let's click on save i now have three different steps showing up in my flow if i wanted to modify any of these steps i could simply click on the item and i could drag it to a new position so maybe i want to launch excel then close it and then show the message here i'll move that back to the second position i could also click on one of these steps and i could press ctrl c to copy it and then i could press ctrl v to paste it so this way i could copy one of my steps and maybe i want to paste the display message to the end again now i have a full flow so let's click on run to see how this works here it launched excel and i also see my message prompt when i click ok it'll now close excel and once again i see the message prompt let's say maybe i don't want one of these steps anymore i can click on that step and then i can press the delete key and that'll remove it from my list of actions that i want the computer to take all right we've now completed our very first very simple flow it's not the most useful flow we simply launch an app show a message and then we close the app but it shows you some of the basics of how you could use different actions to start building a flow now that we're all done let's click on save and let's go back to the main interface and we'll build another flow that leverages some ui elements right up here i'll click on x and here we are back on the main screen on the main screen let's go to the top left hand corner and click on new flow for this one i want this to leverage the calculator so let's call the flow calculator we're now back in the pad designer and it should now look familiar this is our second flow that we're going to pull together this time i want to launch an application and then we'll use the desktop recorder to capture some ui elements up here i want to launch the calculator app so let's go up to actions in the top and then let's type in app here we want to run an application so i'll take this action and pull it over into the canvas this opens up a prompt where we can specify the application that we want to run now i already looked up the application path for the calculator and it's located in this location so if you want to follow along feel free to type in this location all of the other settings look fine and once again one thing to call out is we're producing a variable called the app process id so if we ever need to refer back to this app or this instance of the app that's open we're going to have that in our flow variables once we're good to go let's click on save the first step launches the calculator and to make sure that it's working properly let's click on run here we can see that it launches the calculator app and we now have the calculator available to us next i want to capture some ui elements using the desktop recorder this also shows you how you can use the recorder to capture some of the steps that you're taking here i'll click on desktop recorder the main designer screen disappears and now we have the recorder over here now let's just do a very basic example maybe i'll just do two plus two so here i can click on start recording so the recording is now on and i'll go over to the calculator and here you see that it highlights one of the ui elements on my screen so here if i hover over the number two you see this red rectangle around it here i'll click on number two over in the recorder you see that it now captures that action so it says i pressed the button and it was the number two i could pause the recording if i want to do something in the meantime and then resume recording but for now i'll keep recording going next i'll click on the plus icon and here too you see another step was just added here i'll click on two again so we'll click on two plus two and next i'll click on equals so here all of my steps have been recorded next let's click on finish back within the flow designer here i can see that we launched the application and i see all the steps that i just recorded it goes through two plus two equals and then we get the result so here if i run it now will launch the calculator and now it goes through and adds two plus two and it gives me four so once again it's copying all of the different mouse clicks that i made and here i could see all the steps that it went through as i clicked on the different buttons on the screen pad created ui elements for me here i'll go over to the right hand side and remember when we oriented ourselves to the experience there was a category called ui elements here now that i could see that it identifies the window calculator and it pulled out the button two here i could click on it and i could see exactly what that looks like and then i could see plus and i could see equals right here if i want to add additional ui elements once again i could go back to the desktop recorder and i can capture ui elements that way or i can click on this button that says add ui element when i click on this this once again opens up my screen and here i see the calculator so let's say i wanted to do three plus one here i could click on three and if i press the control key while clicking on it here it adds a new ui element next i'll click on one and i've already captured the equal sign so there's no reason to click on that again so now i've included three and one as additional ui elements next let's click on done this drops me back into the pid designer and within the ui elements screen i now see that for the calculator window i now have three and one as additional buttons and i could leverage these ui elements as part of my flow so previously i took two and i added it to two but let's change it to one plus three so here i'll select the first button press and when i click on that here it's currently referencing the number two but i can now change that to let's say the number one and here you can see the ui element that corresponds with the number one so i'll select that and then click on save here for the number two i can double click on that and here too i'll change it from two and this time i'll change it to the button three click on select and click on save now instead of adding two plus two it's going to add one plus three here if i run it let's see how it works here the calculator adds one plus three and that gives me four back on the main screen to get this flow here we use the desktop recorder but i also to show you how you can set up this same exact flow using the actions over on the left hand side for now let's select all of these different items and hit the delete key so once again you can very simply delete any of the steps in your flow over on the left hand side there's a category called ui automation ui stands for user interface the easiest way to think of this is this is any clicks on windows any clicks on buttons those are all referred to as ui over here there's an item called click ui element in window and on the calculator we want to click on different elements within that window so here i can select that item and i'll drag it over into my flow this opens up a prompt where i can specify which ui element to click right down here currently it's blank so let's click on this drop down and here i see that i've already added ui elements for the calculator app we use the desktop recorder to capture some of these ui elements you could also go over to the pane over here like we did before and you can add ui elements this way as well also let's say you want another way to add ui elements you could also click on this add a new ui element and this once again will open up the same exact screen where we could add additional ui elements now i've already captured all the ui elements i want so i'll simply click on this drop down list and once again we'll do two plus two here i'll select the button two and then click on select here you can specify the click type we just want this to be a left click but you can choose all different types of clicks once you select that let's click on save and so far this will open the calculator it'll click the number two but then we want to add and then we want to have another two and then we want the equals here i'll click on that action and i can copy and paste it so here now i have another step here i'll click on this next step and here i want it to add so i'll go down and let's choose a ui element for plus then click on select then click on save here i'll paste in two again and let me just make sure that's after the plus and then i can paste in one more step and i want this to be the equal sign so here i'll go in and choose the ui element for the equals press then i'll click on select save and if i click on run this will be exactly the same as the flow that i created with the desktop recorder so just another way to create the same exact flow now you can use either the desktop recorder or you could simply add the different steps depending on which one you prefer and which approach you think is easier here let's run it and just verify that it works the same way you probably never thought adding two plus two would be so exciting but we just automated our computer again so far we've been looking at some of the fundamentals of how you can create your very first flow in pad now i want to switch gears and we're going to look at a more advanced example if you want to follow along with this one i've included all of the sample files in the description of this video here at the kevin cookie company and yes i was able to incorporate the kevin cookie company into this tutorial we have a whole bunch of cookie order forms and these order forms are all different word documents if i open up one of the order forms you can see the type of information that's contained within i have the order number the customer name the cookie type the quantity and there's some additional information on here now i want to take all of this information from each one of these different order forms and i want to consolidate it or aggregate it into this order tracker that i have in excel now previously i'd have to go through each individual word document i'd have to copy out the information and then i'd have to paste it into excel but of course that takes a long time it's a lot of manual work and i really wouldn't enjoy doing that so instead why don't we use pad to extract information from each and individual word document and place it into this excel sheet now in this example i only have five order forms so there aren't really that many and you could do it manually but let's just imagine i had a thousand order forms or ten thousand order forms it would be a lot of manual work within pad just like we've been doing all along let's go to the top left hand corner and click on new flow this opens up the prompt and for this i'll say order form in word to excel once you finish typing in the name let's create our flow we're back in the pad designer and as a very first step i first want to get all of the files that are in the folder so here if i go back to my desktop i have all the cookie order forms within this folder called cookie order forms so the first step is going to be to retrieve all of these files to retrieve all of the files over on the left hand side we have an action category for folders when i expand this i see all these different actions that i can take on a folder now i want to get all of those files from within the folder and the very first action here is get files in folder that sounds exactly like what i want to do i'll click on this action and then drag it over onto the canvas this opens up a prompt and i can select all of the different parameters here at the top i could specify the folder that i want to get files for over here i could click on this and i could hard code the folder that i want to get files for here i have the folder on my desktop so i'll select desktop and right down here i see my cookie order forms i'll click on that and then click on ok down below i can also apply a file filter let's say i had different file types in there or maybe file types that were unrelated to the order forms i could filter them out down below i could also specify whether i want to include subfolders i don't have any subfolders so i'll leave that checked off down below here you'll see that it produces a variable and this variable is a list of all of the different files that are contained within that folder just like we've seen earlier in the other examples it'll add a flow variable over here and we'll be able to leverage that later all of this looks good so let's click on save it's now added the first step to the flow and it's going to get the files in the folder here too we can see some of the specifics of what it's doing so it's getting files in this specific folder here we can see the filter that's applied so it's just going to fetch all the different files within that folder and then it's storing them in this variable and here again we can see the variable over on the right hand side next i want to launch microsoft excel so just like we did in the earliest example today let's go down to excel and then let's click on launch excel here i'll drag it over and that'll be the second step of our flow here it says launch excel but we don't want to launch with a blank document we want to launch with our order tracker so here i'll click on the drop-down and i'll select open the following document when i select that i can choose a document path and i'm going to hard code this as well i'll click on select file and i have the file sitting on my desktop so i'll navigate there select the order tracker and then click on open back on the main screen i can also select whether i want to make the instance visible i'd like it to show up as it's running through this so i'll leave that toggled on here i'll see that it produces a variable called excel instance and that'll add it over into flow variables this all looks good so let's click on save now that i have excel open i want to go through each individual order form in my folder and i wanted to scrape out all of the details and i needed to go through document by document to do that i need to use something called a loop and over on the actions menu there's a category for loops if i expand that i see a few different types of loops that i can use now i wanted to go through my folder and for each file within the folder i wanted to pull out the details so i want to set up a for each loop i can click on this action and i'll drag it over onto my canvas and i'll put it after launching excel this opens up a prompt where i can specify the value i want the for each loop to iterate over now once again in the first step we got all of the files in a folder and then we created a variable with a list of all of the files and that variable is called files so i wanted to go through that list of all of the files over here i can click on the select variable icon and here i could select the list of files so i'll select this variable you'll see here there's a percentage sign files and a percentage sign this is how pad denotes a variable down here as well i see that not only is it going through this list of variables but it's also creating its very own variable called current item so when the loop runs for the first time it'll pull out that one document and it'll store it in current item when it goes through the loop again the current item will be the second document that it goes through so each time the loop goes through this current item will update all of this looks good so let's click on save we now have the loop showing up in the canvas and we can add steps within the loop so whatever steps i have within the loop are going to be repeated for each document within the folder as the first step in our for each loop i want to take the current item and i want to rename it extract we're going to use this one file to extract all of the order details the reason for this is we're going to identify ui elements and we want to make sure that they're the same across all files to rename the file let's go over to the left hand side and click on file and here we see an action for a rename file let's click on this and then let's drag this within our for each loop this opens up a rename file prompt and first i could select the file that i want to rename now i wanted to rename every single file that's within the list and so right now it has the current item i'll click on select variable and i'll select the current item so each time the loop goes through it'll rename the current item i'll select that and for the new file name i'll type in extract down below i could also decide whether i want to keep the extension that's dot docx and i do want to keep that down below it also says if the file exists now every time it runs through this loop it's going to rename the file to extract so it's going to exist the second time it runs through all the way up through the last time it runs so here i'll click on this drop down and i want it to overwrite the existing file so i'll select overwrite down below let's click on save now that i have a renamed file i want to open microsoft word so we can extract all of the details from the word document now i need to launch the application so let's go over to the left hand side under actions and here i'll type in app here the action is run application let's pull that over and we'll do that after renaming the file this opens up a prompt where we need to specify the application path of the app that we want to launch and i'll show you a quick trick how you can get the application path for pretty much any app on your computer to find where an app is stored on your computer simply go down to your taskbar and within the search field type in word this is the application that we want to open here i see a word up here i can right click on this and then we can open the file location this opens up file explorer with the location of the shortcut now the shortcut's not going to launch the application so once again we can right click on the shortcut and then open the file location of that when we click on this this will navigate us to where the exe is and this is exactly what we want to copy this path now press the shift key on your keyboard together with the right mouse button this opens up a context menu and right down here we can copy this as a path let's click on this back now within pad we can paste in the application path i'll paste in what i just copied the one thing you'll want to make sure you do is remove these quotes from the path here i'll delete those down below we also need to enter in a command line argument to open up the file that we just renamed down below let's enter a forward slash a t and then type in the document location for the document location we also need to enter quotes at the beginning and at the end once we're all done let's click on save as a next step we want to create some ui elements within our word document so let's minimize power automate and let's go back to the cookie order forms for now let's take one of our order forms let's copy it and paste it and then let's rename the copy file extract next let's open up the new file called extract back within pad we need to indicate some ui elements that we want to scrape from the word document over on the right hand side just like we did in the earlier examples let's click on ui elements and then down below let's click on add ui element this opens up the add ui elements prompt and i also have my word document here that we just created called extract here we want to pick out all of the data that we want to extract from this document here as i hover over the different elements i can select which elements i want to copy so here i want to take the order number all the way down through the desired delivery date now once again to add a ui element i press the control key and then i click on an area of the screen so here i'll get the order number i want to get the name the cookie type the quantity how they heard about us the preferred delivery method and also the desired delivery date so here i have all of my ui elements let's click on done back within pad within ui elements i can see all of my ui elements now right now they have mostly unfriendly names that are hard to understand over here i know this is the order number so if i go over to the ellipsis on the right hand side i can click on that and i can rename the element i'll go through and rename all of them i've now added ui elements and i've renamed them for all of the different elements that i want to scrape from my word document next i want to extract data from the window so over on the left hand side under ui automation if i click on this there's a category for data extraction when i expand this right here i see an option for extract data from window this is what i want to do extract data from a word window here i'll click on this option and i'll pull it in underneath run application this opens up a prompt to extract the data from a window and essentially what i'm doing i'm taking one of my ui elements i want to take the value of that ui element and i want to save it as a variable so here first i need to select the window so here i see my window with all the ui elements first i want to select the order number i'll pick that as one of the ui elements click on select down below i can decide where i want to store the extracted data and i don't want to just put it in an excel sheet yet instead i want to save it as a variable so i'll select a variable and down below it'll show me what variable will be produced and currently it's called data from window now that's not really that descriptive i can click on that and i can give the variable a new name now i have to leave the percentage sign in front and then back because that's what makes it a variable but here i can modify the middle of it so here i'll call my variable order number so it aligns with my ui element that looks good and next let's click on save i've now created my variable and here you'll see it'll extract the record from that ui element and it'll save it as order number if i go back over here on the right hand side i can click on variables and here now i see that i have a new variable that i created called order number every time it runs through all of these files when it runs through the first file the order number will match the first file when it goes through the second file it'll match the second file now i want to go through and do the exact same thing for all of the different ui elements i want each one of these ui elements to be stored as a variable so i'll go through and do the exact same thing extract the data as i did with order number and i'll do it for each one of these i now have variables for all of my ui elements i now want to pass the value of the variable into excel but before i can do that i need to find the first available row in excel and luckily pid can help me with that over on the left hand side i have a category for excel i'll expand this and here at the very bottom of the list there's an action for get first free column slash row let's click on that one and pull it into the canvas this opens up a prompt and first i need to select the excel instance and here the excel instance when i launched excel earlier it created a variable called excel instance and here it refers back to that this will produce its very own variables here i'll get one variable with the first free column and another variable with the first free row that's perfect let's now click on save i now have all of my variables i also know what the first free row is in the excel sheet the pretty much the last thing i need to do now is write to the excel worksheet and i still have the excel category open here and one of the actions is write to excel worksheet here i'll select this item and drag it over as the next step on the canvas this opens up a prompt where i could define how i want to write the data to the excel worksheet first i need to choose the excel instance and once again when we launched excel earlier we got a variable for excel instance and here i'm going to refer to that variable right here next i need to specify the value i want to write first i want to write the order number so here i'll select a variable and here i can see all of the different variables available to me if i scroll down a little bit i see a variable for the order number so i'll select this item for the right mode i want to write it into a specific cell for the column let's jump back into the excel sheet to see which column we want to write it to within the excel sheet i can see that the order number is the first column so we want to write to column one back within pad for the column i'll enter one down below i could also specify the row and i want to make sure i enter this into the first available row so here i'll click on the select variable and here i can go down and i'll find a variable for the first free row here it is i'll select this variable all of this now looks good so i'll click on save i've now added my step to write to the excel workbook and it's going to write the value of order number and here you can see all of the details now i'm going to go through all of the other variables and set up something similar to this and i'll specify the specific column that these other variables should go into i've now gone through and i've added an action for each one of these variables so for the order number the customer name the referral i'll go through and i'll write each one of these to a specific column and an open row within the excel spreadsheet as the last step of the loop now that i've copied all of the data into the excel sheet i want to close the word document this way i can open up the next document in word over on the left hand side under the system category here you see the option to terminate a process i'll click on this action and then i'll drag it over to the very bottom of my loop this opens up a prompt where i can specify what process i want to terminate first i have an option to choose a process name or a process id earlier when we launched word that generated a process id so i'll select process id and here if i click on select variable i can select the app process id that we got earlier i'll click on that item and then click on save here back in the main view if i scroll up just a little bit here again we see when i launched word if i double click on that here again we can confirm that it produced a variable called app process id we've now finished entering in all of the different steps of our flow and our automation before we click on run up above let's take a quick moment to review all of the different steps if i go up to the very top first we're going to get all of the files so these are all of the order forms that are contained within this folder it's then going to take all of those files and store it as a list within this variable called files next we'll launch excel and we're going to open this order tracker sheet that's when we kick off the loop and we're going to go through every single order form that we stored in files here first we're going to take the current item and we're going to rename it extract then we're going to launch that file in word then we're going to go through and we're going to extract all of the data from the word document we'll find the first available free row in the excel worksheet and then we'll write all of the data into excel then at the very end we'll terminate the word document and then the loop will just continue again where once again we create the next document we open word again with the next document and then it'll keep going through until it goes through all the different documents now one more thing to clean up before we click on run we created an extract file so we could get all the different ui elements let's delete this file before we click on run back now in pad we are ready to kick off this flow in the top left hand corner let's click on run and let's see it work here now you can see it open up the excel document it'll go through and open up each of the word documents and here you can see it start populating the excel file and there it is all those separate word documents are now consolidated into one excel spreadsheet this was just a basic example showing you how we can bring data from word to excel but with pad you can really connect any application together we didn't get into it today but you can also take these desktop flows that we created and you can also connect them to web flows so all in all pad is extremely powerful and also versatile before we wrap up one thing i want to call out especially if you're using multiple monitors you really have to be cautious when i pull together this flow using multiple monitors my ui elements just weren't working properly when i switched back down to one monitor identified all the different ui elements then it seemed to work as i expected so just a word of caution all right well that's how you can get started using power automate desktop if you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up to see more videos like this in the future make sure to hit that subscribe button also if you want to see me cover any other topics leave a comment down below alright well that's all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time [Music] bye you

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 524,475

Rating: 4.9603992 out of 5

Keywords: kevin stratvert, power automate, tutorial, power automate tutorial, microsoft power automate, microsoft, microsoft flow, flow, microsoft power automate tutorial, microsoft automate, automate, power, ms flow, powerautomate, stratvert, flow microsoft, power apps, power automate microsoft, desktop, power automate desktop, how to use, how to, ms power automate, ms, what is, beginners, beginner, walk through, excel, tutorial for beginners, office, office 365, ui, ui elements, macro, design, help

Id: IQ_KpBC8fwo

Length: 37min 39sec (2259 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021