Windows 10 users can now access Microsoft Power Automate Desktop for free

Microsoft on Thursday announced that it was making its Power Automate Desktop solution for Windows 10 available to Windows 10 users in the country for free. The company’s low-code automation system allows businesses to automate certain tasks — especially repetitive and manual ones, as part of its Power Automate Service.

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Running a business today involves a lot of constantly changing factors, some of them out of the control of those at the helm — such as the novel coronavirus pandemic. Performing manual tasks repetitively can impact employee productivity, according to the company. Power Automate Desktop for Windows 10 features a low-code Robotic Process Automate (RPA) application which essentially automates these tedious tasks and helps streamline workflows, the company said on Thursday.

Microsoft’s Power Automate Desktop system allows companies to record actions such as mouse and keyboard clicks as part of the RPA solution that was first announced at Microsoft Ignite in 2019. Once a user has recorded those actions, they can be “re-played” repeatedly, on various applications like Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel and Sharepoint. The service also supports third-party applications and websites.

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Along with automatic tasks like clicking links and buttons, the company says that the Power Automate Desktop solution can also help glean data from multiple sources of data such as PDFs, websites, Excel spreadsheets, or database files and then automatically generate a report on the data, based on specifications provided by the user.

Meanwhile, the company is also offering businesses the ability to automate tasks across an organisation, as part of an ‘Attended RPA plan’ that allows clients to utilise over four hundred connectors via the cloud. Microsoft also offers an AI Builder to extract information from documents and a process advisor to identify what’s slowing down businesses processes, while users can control automation workflows through a centrally managed system.

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According to Microsoft, the company’s acquisition of Sofomotive, a Robotic Process Automate systems company in the UK helped it bring more low-code RPA capabilities to the Microsoft Power Automate service, which is available in English, Spanish, French, German and Japanese. Over 3.5 lakh companies are now making use of the service’s low-code solutions, the company said in a press statement.