Learn Power Automate Desktop in less than two hours on this 2023 beginners course. In the real-time tutorial, you and I will build a complete web scraping project with advanced features. Very easy to understand, yet you'll learn the Power Automate Desktop practices.

Power Automate Desktop is the Microsoft RPA software and free from Windows 11.

📂 Course page including VBScript and Best Power Automate Desktop Resources: https://andersjensen.org/microsoft-po...

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0:00:00 Intro and Overview
Learn to open Power Automate Desktop, pin it to the tray, and create a flow.

0:01:25 Applications and Basic Power Automate Desktop
With the Run Application, we specify an application path, and then Power Automate Desktop will open any application. We can click any UI element with the Click UI Element in window action. The address of the UI element is called a selector. In the UI elements, we can edit the selector. You'll learn how to create a dynamic selector - a selector with a variable in. To save the data from the application, we use the Extract data from window action. Using the Get subtext, we can extract the text we need from a series of characters. Next, we create a log with a date and time and look at error handling (On error and Label).

0:34:07 Open Browser and Do a Search
The Launch new Chrome/Edge/Firefox actions, with a URL in the parameters, will open a website of your choice. The populate text field on web page action lets you type into web page fields. To perform the search, we send an enter click with the Send keys action.

0:38:17 Web Scraping to Excel
With the Extract data from web page action, we can extract any structured web data with Microsoft Power Automate Desktop. The scraped data is stored in a DataTable variable, and we write it in Excel.

56:16 Extract Multiple Pages With a Next Button
We inspect the CSS code for the Next button. Power Automate Desktop uses CSS selectors, so little knowledge about that is preferred. When we have it, we use a Loop condition action, and in the loop, an If web page contains action to keep clicking the Next button and extract the next page. Unfortunately, there is no direct way to join two DataTables in Power Automate Desktop, so we create a workaround.

1:10:27 Error-Handling
With the On error property and the Label action, we handle errors in our Power Automate Desktop flow.

1:12:44 For Each Excel Row do Web Searches
We use a For each action to loop an Excel sheet and then perform web searches.

1:22:00 Advanced CSS Selector Work
We need to know about CSS selectors to customize our scraped data from an Extract data from a web page.

1:34:18 VBScript in Power Automate Desktop
Scripting knowledge is beneficial as a Power Automate Desktop developer. However, I recommend VBScript over Python and JavaScript because it integrates well with Microsoft. Use the VBScript action and copy the script from the course page (link above).

1:38:37 Create an Advanced Log
Finally, we create an advanced log with runtime date and time and a detailed log that displays the transactions that are successful and with errors. Finally, we can email the complete log with the Send email message through Outlook.

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