Microsoft’s Power Automate Desktop is now free

[WkdPaul]

Summary

Microsoft announced that it is making Power Automate Desktop, its enterprise-level tool for creating automated desktop-centric workflows, available to all Windows 10 users for free. 

 

Quotes

Quote

Power Automate Desktop is what Microsoft calls its “attended Robotic Process Automation” solution, but you can think of it as a macro recorder on steroids. It comes with 370 prebuilt actions that help you build flows across different applications, but its real power is in letting you build your own scripts to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

 

Power Automate Desktop originally launched last September. It’s based on Microsoft’s acquisition of Softomotive in early 2020, but Microsoft has since extended Softomotive’s technology and integrated it deeper into its own stack.

 

[...] it’ll become part of Microsoft’s Insider Builds for Windows 10 and then eventually become a built-in part of Windows 10, all the way down to the standard Windows Home version.

 

My thoughts

That could be useful for some users stuck doing repetitive tasks, I'm probably going to have a look at it now that it's free and see what it's all about and if it can be useful for me, and if I find any utility to it, I might look at what uses it can have at work.

 

Sources

https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/02/microsofts-power-automate-desktop-is-now-free-for-all-windows-10-users

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/

Edited March 3, 2021 by wkdpaul

[TetraSky]

Played around with it a bit.

I see that it has a "desktop recording" feature as well, so you don't have to use the left side menu to pick and choose what you want to automate, you can just "do it" to make it learn what to do that way.

But it's not perfect, it doesn't seems to work all the time and it cannot pick up anything if it's not on the Host system.

 

Tried to make it do something simple from Host to interacting with a software inside a VM and it failed. It couldn't recognize anything. That was unfortunate, but expected.

 

It did work to make a very simple and rudimentary auto clicker, though.

For now, I don't have any use for it, but I might keep playing around with it. Will see if it's possible to automate things like checking stock prices just for the fun of it.

[williamcll]

Convenient, but it's going to take forever for me to understand how to use.

[trag1c]

Hmm I'll to give it a go once I have some free time since it sounds like it could be very useful. Is it similar to Auto Hotkey at all?

[VanayadGaming]

I recommend using UiPath Studio instead. It is a much more powerful tool, and yes, it is free for personal use.

[n0stalghia]

Is that like macOS's Automator? Rad. I've been wishing for a software like this since at least 2007. 

[suicidalfranco]

7 hours ago, n0stalghia said:

Is that like macOS's Automator? Rad. I've been wishing for a software like this since at least 2007. 

Now they just need something like preview

[Mihle]

I am curious, anyone here use it or something similar regularly?

Do you have any examples on what you use it for?

[n0stalghia]

2 hours ago, Mihle said:

I am curious, anyone here use it or something similar regularly?

Do you have any examples on what you use it for?

I might set it up to convert video files. Right now I do it in plain old Python, maybe this offers some easier tools to do it. 

 

I definitely see a use case for batch-renaming files, provided it accepts regex patterns as input (right now I'm using Python to do it as well)

[FakeNSA]

We actually use this at work for some sharepoint, teams, and SCSM integrations. Interesting to see it become free!

Looking forward to digging into it!