Power Automate Desktop enhances the robotic power of the robotic process automation (RPA) in Power Automate and enables you to perform all-recursive desktop processes. It's faster and easier. A new Power Automate Desktop flow designer that has built-in drag and drop actions or recording your desktop flow for later use.
Power Automate Desktop provides incredible capabilities for automation. Create a flow, among everyday tools like email, excel and be successful and work with modern and legacy applications.
Examples of simple and complex tasks you can do are :
Power Automate Desktop uses low codes RPA (no need for coding) to give you time to get back to high-value work by handling "busy work" work. RPA makes it possible to streamline workflows in modern and valuable applications on your desktop by recording actions such as mouse click and keyboard.
It works great as a macros function in your favorite Microsoft Office app, by recording recurring actions from your desktop across multiple applications such as SharePoint, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and many third-party applications and websites, allowing you to repeat automation at any time when needed.
A common scenario we see is the need to measure and automate large-scale weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting. With Power Automate Desktop, you can automatically integrate data from multiple sources such as databases, web pages, Excel files, PDFs, and many more, to generate results automatically according to your needs.
| Power Automate | Power Automate Desktop |
| Power Automate is a web or a cloud application. | Power Automate Desktop is a desktop application that we need to install. |
| A variety of connectors are available but for premium ones, you need to pay for them. | We don't need to pay for anything. |
| We don't have a drag and drop feature for actions. | We can drag and drop actions in the flow. |
| We cannot record our session in power automate as there is no in-built feature. | We can record sessions from the web and desktop using the in-built recorder feature. |
| It is used for Modern Apps with APIs. | It is used for Legacy Apps with no available APIs. |
| Sharing of flows and integrating them with cloud flows is possible. | Sharing of flows and integrating them with cloud flows is not possible. |
| Flows can be connected to data connectors. | No feature to connect flows to data connectors. |
| An advanced feature like AI builder is available. | An advanced feature like AI builder is not available. |
| Flows are a bit difficult to create as they offer more variety of features as compared to Power Automate. | Flows are easy to create as compared to Power Automate. |
| It can be used for a large number of different applications by using different types of connectors. | It can be used for web automation and desktop automation applications. |
It’s pretty easy to start with Power Automate Desktop and build your desktop flow. There is a number of steps that are involved to automate a specific action or task. Either by using built-in drag-and-drop actions or by recording your own desktop flows.
I am Sharvari Raut, having sound knowledge and experience in technical writing. Currently, pursuing my B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering.