Power Automate Desktop Recorder

hey everyone this is Daniel and in today's video we're going to look at the power automate for desktop recorder and this is a continuation of my power automate for desktop series and for the other videos you can look at the link below in the description so the desktop recorder is a really sweet service that comes along with the overall power automate for desktop feature and one of the neat things about the recorder is that you can actually go ahead and add all of those actions automatically just by recording them and one of the neat things I like about this is that anytime you have those Legacy applications and you really don't know which of those actions you need to use start the recorder go ahead and click and do your steps and the recorder will automatically add those actions for you so stick around this is a pretty sweet service but first here's my intro video [Music] [Applause] thank you so let's get started and here we are in the power automate for desktop and over here I'll click on the plus new flow because I want to quickly get into the console focus on the recorder and then after that jump in straighten the demo so I'm going to go and give a flow name and I'll click on Create and then now it is going to open up another section which will get reduced to the console as you can see it is selling getting things ready and we will be directly into the console so this is neat this is something you're familiar with we actually looked at that in the previous video what I'll do is I'll go and click on Save just to make sure that I actually have my overall flow created and now we're going to spend all the time on this video talking about this recorder so as I go and hover on that it says capture the steps of your automation to be converted into flow actions which is literally what it means is that you click you start the recording when you're recording you're actually copying flow actions automatically for you so when I go and click on this this is what happens first of all that main section lowers up and another window pops up and this is what it is it's called as the recorder so it's let's print few minutes is looking at what all this means it says you haven't recorded any actions yet select record to start recording your flow right click on a UI element to open the context menu of the recorder and I'll show you what that means in a minute so right here is the recorder there is the reset we can take a look at that as well and then there are these three dots which is like the Ellipsis and over here there's some additional features which is a launch new web browser it's automatically going ahead and now working with four different launches Edge Chrome Firefox and the Internet Explorer over here my recommendation to you is avoid using Internet Explorer start getting into the Microsoft Edge all right just keep that in mind and then you can also do some image recording which means if you have any images you can actually record it save that image there's all these flexibilities available over here so to further explain how this recorder works we're actually going to jump into a demo and here's what my demo is that's close to the real world as possible what I have over here is a legacy desktop application it's called contoso invoicing what this Legacy application actually means is that it doesn't have any apis apis is basically a way for me to talk to that application using power automate flows or some other code in the back end without me going and clicking it this doesn't have that flexibility that means we've got to use this robotic process automation technique to automate some of the work with that application and that's why we're going to use this this contoso invoicing application if I go and click on it this is what that app looks like say it opens up and we've got this app what I want to do is that on a daily basis come directly to the support go to the cases and I want to go and grab each the last case that comes in I want to go and grab that case and I want to go and save that into say an Excel spreadsheet I want to automate that process remember I just said apis are not available I cannot go ahead and do this from any back-end code I have to use robotic a robotic process automation so here is what the application looks like and my Excel spreadsheet is pretty simple and straightforward so let me just go and open up my Excel spreadsheet so you can actually take a look at that as well so here is what my Excel spreadsheet looks like when I go and double click on it this is what the spreadsheet is it's a pretty blank spreadsheet and I've actually gone and done some formatting basically just to say which one is an ID column name address phone email and notes so if you actually just take a look at this from a side-by-side comparison I went ahead and actually planned this just the exact same way ID name street address phone number email notes and for the same one I went and actually added those columns over here I want to be able to take that information from the Legacy application called contoso invoicing and automate the process by adding it into my Excel spreadsheet now remember I'm using an Excel spreadsheet for the example you could have some other scenarios so this is what our overall achievement is that this is what we want to achieve so what I'm going to do is I'm not going to go ahead and close those both these applications close in fact everything except for the recorder and we're going to start the process so to start recording you can click on either one of the options the record up over there or this record button over here it's the exact same so when I go and click on record now I can see the pause button has come up which means the recording has initiated and as you can see as I start hovering my mouse over some things it tells me that hey this is a list item which means now it's identifying exactly what your mouse is hovering over so I'll go and double click on this contoso invoicing as I double click on it it has already identified that hey I did a double click and now the application is open now what I want to do is I want to go and capture the support cases that have come in so I'll actually click on the support cases and so now it identified on the left as well hey that's what you click or support cases next thing I want to do is I want to capture each and every column from here and I want to go and save that somewhere else so for the ID column see the first ID column I'll click on it all right and then I'm going to go and say what is it that I want from there do I want to get a text or do I actually want to get that ID numerical value and it's telling me what the numerical value is it's one zero zero seven well that's what I want so now I'm going to click on it and I'm going to follow that along for all these other columns as well all right so I'm going to right click on that and I'm going to go and say hey I do want to get that name right here I'm going to cover over this one yes I do actually want to get that street address same thing phone let me go get the phone number as well get that phone number by the way it's a 555 which means that phone number is not tied to anybody okay it's fictitious and I'll go and get the name and then finally I'll also go and get the notes all right so I'll go and get that now this all became so much more easier to do it with the desktop recorder but it's not the final thing right so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go ahead and now close this but in your real world scenario this was a real world scenario what I would also do is I follow it on the other steps I would actually go ahead and delete all these other columns I mean other you know data that I want because I only won the last one there's other things you can do over there so remember this is like a real world type demo that I'm doing but I want to explain to you that there's so much other options available now the last thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and now close this all right and so that's what I did I had the open and then I have a close and now I'm actually done so when I click on done right over here it has all the steps that we recorded and you know me I am a very cautious person so I'm going to go and click on step uh save so now it's saving all right it's gone and done every saving so once it does we'll spend a little bit of time looking at what just happened over here awesome so the saving is completed and as a verification on the bottom left it says status is already saved also now that in this one we use the recorder it's giving us these hints right on the top it says start of on an auto generated actions using the recorder way at the bottom it says end of Auto generated actions using the recorder so these are really good hints or notes to tell you that hey which of these were actually something that you entered versus which of them were those added by the auto generate one I really like these little hints given over here well now we want to actually go and build on on top of this but first of all we need to do some cleanup over here and this is the beauty of using the recorder and then having all of these actions and steps available for you to do some cleanup so you kind of already got you know got some hints away what is happening what is Daniel going to record well for the update one of the things is that these variables are not making any sense to me so let's go and tweak those so first of all is the first thing that we went on caption which was basically just the ID it went ahead and stored it in an attribute value and that name doesn't make any sense to me so I need to actually start changing these variable names to actually match those columns that we pulled so just to be safe though for me I'm going to just put this on the smaller side reduce the side of the application screen let me open this one up and Pull It by the side so I just make sure I actually get the correct information so for the cases there was ID name street addresses so that's what I'm going to try to replicate over here so I'm just moving that a little bit I'm going to move this one a little bit wider and then here we go for that first one I'm going to click on this actual step that we did and here I'm going to change the name form attribute value this is going to be VAR ID and here's how you do it you simply click on it and over here by default when you click on it it puts sent at the beginning and the end you don't have to worry about that you have to make sure that oh the data or the variable just needs in between don't worry about that here's what I'm doing I'm just going to type in this bar and I'm going to put this as ID or uppercase ID now when I click on save it saves it over here and it made sure that the percent automatically came in it actually factored that in and under the flow variables it also went and updated that over there I love how beautiful this is as far as understanding where to make the changes automatically so I didn't have to go and make the change over here I didn't have to go and make the change over there it automatically took care of that let's continue all right so we went and got the bar ID well now I gotta go in and make sure that I get also the name so I'm going to click on that action step over here as well and then right on that bar attribute variable of the attribute value value too as I just go and do a you know select all this is going to be the VAR name that's what it is it's actually the bar name I'm going to save it it changed over here it changed over there as well so let's continue right let's just go and make all these other changes as well when I click on that one it's actually click once and then click once once the drop down thing happens and so this one is now going to be VAR street address so I'm just as you can see I'm trying to maintain this consistency between what we recorded versus what's actually over there and the variable names consistency is the big thing again click on back over here clicking on this click on that and then below it right here I'll go and now call this one as the VAR phone I could call it as bar phone number as well again I'm just trying to match the column names so I'll do that I'll click on this one select that again this is going to be the VAR email so I'll click on Save next that's going to be the last one so I'll select that right here click on that and come back and click on it again this is going to be bar notes so if I go and click on Save now we've at least gone ahead and update all of these and now these flow variables are making name and they are making sense and that's going to help you a lot so what we did so far and by the way I'm just clicking on the save function over here right so what we did so far is we went and now used the recorder to get the information but now I need to be able to save this information in an Excel spreadsheet the one that I just showed you so we are now going to go ahead and add our additional actions over here okay our additional steps for that we're going to use Excel so now that I'm done I can go and actually close this application I can go ahead and expand this and make it nicely big and here I'm going to go ahead and just type in Excel apps and then we've got to go and do a few things in the Excel first things first is we've got a launch Excel so here I'm just going to grab that drag it and you've got two options you could go ahead and put it on the top or you can go and put it on the bottom the reason I am putting it below that line over there is so that I in the future know okay the ones which were from all the way from 1 to 11 as you can see from 1 to 11 those were Auto generated by the recorder the ones below are the ones that I manually added maintaining this consistency will help you troubleshoot in the future all right so we are going to launch not a blank document but the one that we actually have so I'm going to click on that and when I click on this one another pop-up comes in and I need to actually go and find my Excel spreadsheet so for that I actually can go ahead and now directly go and grab the location of it which is right over here it's a spreadsheet sample one I'll click on open and I'll keep everything else as this and go and click on save so we've launched the Excel spreadsheet and now I need to go ahead and start saving data over there but one of the things we got to be careful of is I can't just go start saving data on the first cell I need to First go and find which is the first a free column and row available and for that we actually go and get this one action which is already available it says get free First Column Row from Excel worksheet so I'll just drag that and I'll go and put that in over here and we'll take a look at that see here's what it is it says get first free column Row from Excel worksheet so I'll actually go and expand that over here and what I want is I don't want the first free column because I do actually want to use the assigned columns that I have so I'm going to toggle this one off but I do want to use the first free column a first free row because I want to make sure it's on the first free one and so what I'll do is I'll go and click on Save but before I do that I want to make sure that you see this parameter what it says is that the Excel instance this Excel instance is going to be run for this specific parameter which is basically a variable and that variable it automatically went in and assigned the one that we used for the launch Excel application our action over there love it because it was smart enough to realize that hey we're going to go ahead and do an action for an Excel spreadsheet well the only spreadsheet option I have available is from the previous action which is the launch Excel so it automatically went and assigned that so now we've done two things we launched Excel spreadsheet we went ahead and identified the first column of the first free row next we need to go ahead and now start saving some data over there now my saving I actually mean we need to write data over there and the actual action that we need is the one to write to Excel worksheet so I'm going to grab that and I'm going to go and drop it over here and now this pop-up window comes in so the first thing we want to do is understand what it is that's over here now what the right the value to write with well the first thing that we want to do is make sure that it actually goes ahead and writes the VAR ID the VAR ID is the first one that you want to grab so I'm going to go and select the VAR ID and the right mode it's on the specified cell column it's going to be the First Column and then the variable well that's actually the first free row that's right there first we wrote I'll select that all of this looks good and remember now we can actually do a lot of copying and pasting so I'll click on Save and there you go because we're going to write the bar ID to the first row of the first column on the first free row in the Excel spreadsheet whose instance is the Excel instance so now when I just click on it I can into our control C I can do a control V and another action shows up over here however we need to change that so I'll just go and double click on that one and the value to write well the value to write is no longer going to be the VAR ID it's going to be the next one so if I actually move this over here the next one we need is the VAR name now what I can do is when I click over here and I go and search for bar name and I still select save it actually goes ahead and appends to it so we don't want to do that so something to keep in mind is that you just wipe this you know completely delete this or hit backspace select the X and now you go ahead and get the bar name so I'll do that and that's the only one that we get over there all right column name you got to change that from one to two and there we go we've got the second one done as well so we just have a few more to do so let's go and do the same thing I'll click on that do a control C Ctrl V next one is done double click on that one over here this one we got a change so I'm going to go ahead and delete the VAR name because that's not what we need anymore we're going to change the bar name to VAR street address select that I'm going to get the bar screen address right there selected this is going to be column number three right over there and save keep going let's keep going so doing Ctrl C Ctrl V I'll go and open that one up over here and then I'll make sure I delete this entire thing off and I'll select that and now this is going to be what is it what's what do you got after this this is going to be the VAR phone which is right over here and that is not going to be three that's going to be four right there my phone and then we've actually got just two more to go so we'll go into a control C and we'll see control V and keep going click on that one and then wipe this off all the way which is it's not the bar phone anymore the next one is the VAR email so I'll select the X look for our email right there select it this is column number five and then last we've got to go ahead and put one for the notes so do Ctrl C Ctrl V so right there double click on that one this is going to be the VAR notes and see I just made a mistake because it went and append it so I gotta first delete that right there click on the X go grab the bar notes select insert change this one to number six and now you're saved so we are almost done the only other thing that we've got to do is close the Excel spreadsheet so we just go and grab that close the Excel spreadsheet put it all all the way to the bottom and this one we've got the option see it already went and recognized which was an Excel instance and picked that up but before closing Excel spreadsheet it has the default setting as do not save document well we do want to save the document and over here you've got the flexibility that hey if you want to make sure that we're always having a copy so that we don't always edit the original one that's also a good practice well then for that go ahead and do save as I mean you do save as you are given the option to where you want to go and save it any location changes it's giving you all that flexibility so I'm just going to go save document click on Save and there you go this is all done so now we'll go as be good stewards we'll go and save it and before we run it let's go to that Excel spreadsheet that I have open which is right over here let me go and close that as well that all looks good and now let's go and do a test so what I'll do is I'll just do a full run all right so we'll see actually what happens when I click on run it's actually going to go through each of the steps so it actually directly when it opened up the contoso one selected the cases is now copying it automatically opening up the Excel spreadsheet directly based on it and it closed it and so if I go back now to our actual flow which we did see status is ready and it even went ahead and grabbed all the names the one that it went and captured it went and grabbed it so as you can know the top row for that Excel spreadsheet which we'll go open up that spreadsheet just to make sure that it actually did save it over here it went and grabbed that see so it went and put it on row number two why because it had to get the first free space of the column A Row the first free space was two and it went and grabbed that now in your real world scenario you would actually delete that Row from your on your original Legacy application you you would take care of all of that logic this is just a demo but is this logic sound enough that is it going to overwrite this row or is it going to add another one because it's looking for the first free space well let's test it all right so I'll just close this Excel spreadsheet so that our automate flow doesn't get confused I'll do a full run so now when it's going doing a full run it's going to go ahead and do the whole thing all over again grab the information it's going to be duplicates obviously because the last row we didn't delete it but hey as you noticed over there and we'll open up the power automate desktop you see that first free row changed to number three which means that if you open up that Excel spreadsheet it was smart enough to see get me the next first free Row the first video available at that time was three and then the ID also started from the first one which was one you see how smart this overall system is that it's also able to identify the first three spaces and then it's going ahead and making sure that the data doesn't get overwritten it is literally finding the new available space over there so I'm going to go and close this Excel spreadsheet and also look at a few things in this recorder so in the recorder right on this Ellipsis there is the option for launch new web browser now when you go and launch these web browsers keep in mind that each of these web browsers will need the recorder add-in so for example if I were to click on Microsoft Edge it opens up over here and you see I already have this add-in available and you've got this flexibility to go ahead and add in the software directly into the browser each of them really have that there could be a PDF add-in by another company in our Microsoft power automate desktop you've got to get these recorders app these are add-ins added for the power automate recorder so if I go and click on this one right there you'll actually see that it's already available which is great but you need to go ahead and add these other add-ins and extensions so if I click on this one for example for this Edge you can see that if I add more actions I already have the one for Microsoft power automate but if you open up say Google in your Google one you will need those add-ins available so kind of keep in mind that you will need all this you know additional extensions added on that side okay so that's one of them now you've got like I showed you before you've got all of these functionalities you've got the Microsoft Edge Chrome Firefox and Internet Explorer my personal recommendation is avoid using Internet Explorer stick to Microsoft Edge if that's what you want and see here's a good thing it actually came up with saying you need the power automate extensions to use web Automation in your flows select get extension to download and install to the selected browser it's actually giving you the recommendation all right so I'm going to go and click on cancel now we also have these image recording functionality which you can toggle on and this is as the name suggests for those scenarios where all you want to do is image recording so let me show you right I'm going to go and now just do a record just a random record now in a starting record if I have all of these things it tells me list items if I click on it I get that hey you did a left click on Microsoft Edge and this is what it looks like however if I now go ahead and toggle on the image recording check this out if I went selected no longer did it select that option which was the left click on Microsoft Edge all they did was right click on the image and it got us the image same thing over there I could actually do a right click and I can also go and do the same thing for the image but you see the other thing I can do a right click and I can extract text from the image which means it's got the object character recognition or OCR functionality as well so that means you have to always go ahead and turn on from the toggle switch in order to get the image recording feature working and finally I want to take a look at all of this right side of the console and how it was going ahead and affecting the recorder so you went and saw these variables right when we were doing the testing you saw the variables getting populated that's just one section if you go below over here you can actually go and see all the UI elements so basically use UI means user interface elements every single one that we selected see the example well what was the text that we got cases then ID number the name all of that these are all UI elements that we were using directly interfering with that's the one that gets recorded over here and then the final one is the image images when you go and select the images here you can actually go and capture an image as well I can go three second delay five second delay I can go and see the images directly over here this is how this right side all these features in the console directly take part in the recording functionality so as a quick recap we used the desktop recorder to enhance our ability to add actions to record these actions and we've got the flexibility to even go in and edit them by actually adding those variable names in our example and then finally we ended by looking at how we can only toggle on the image recording functionality which only requires the images but it has the built-in functionality to even extract text that is using object character recognition so hopefully this video was useful to you and as always keep using power automate desktop with the desktop recorder hello hello hello so if you like this video go ahead and click on that subscribe button and smash that like button also if you have a few extra seconds can you go and put in a comment either say something nice or give me ideas for my next video and until then see ya

Channel: Daniel Christian

Views: 4,430

Keywords: Power Automate for Desktop Recorder, Daniel Christian Power Automate, power automate desktop, microsoft power automate tutorial, power automate desktop tutorial, power automate desktop automation, web recorder in power automate desktop, robotic process automation, power automate desktop for beginners, Record from a legacy desktop software, Save to Excel spreadsheet, getting started with power automate desktop, desktop recorder in power automate, desktop recorder

Id: nr_RNYWDIxM

Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 09 2023