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Power Automate and Power Automate Desktop Training

This page contains information on all of the training that we provide on Power Automate and Power Automate Desktop.

We currently run the following scheduled Power Automate and PAD courses:

Not exactly the course contents you want? Why not consider organising your own tailored Power Automate and PAD course)?

More about our Power Automate and Power Automate Desktop training

If you're not sure whether you should be using Power Automate, Power Automate Desktop, both or neither, here's a quick comparison!

You can see a longer comparison in this blog, which tries to show in more details the differences between these two products which have such deceptively similar names!

Power Automate Desktop

The purpose of Power Automate Desktop is to create flows like this one:

Excel flow

As it happens, this flow would open Excel, read in some data from a workbook and then close Excel down again.

Power Automate Desktop allows you to read from (or write to) parts of web browser or other application forms:

Web form

You can select any part of a web page or application, and either write text in to it or read from it.

You can use loops, conditions and variables, although there's no language to learn:

Loops and variables

This program is looping over a range of Excel cells, doing something for each (and using variables to hold the intermediate values).

 

Here are most of the commands that you can use in Power Automate:

The main commands

The commands that you select from.

 

However, each of these commands contains a host of subcommands.  Here as one example is what you get if you choose Mouse and keyboard

Mouse and keyboard

The mouse and keyboard events that you can automate.

 

The best way to think of Power Automate Desktop is like this: it does for the whole of Windows what VBA macros do for Excel.

Power Automate

Whereas Power Automate Desktop is designed to automate things that you do on your computer, Power Automate allows you to create cloud flows.  Typical applications that you might want to automate could include:

Applications Notes
File storage Cloud flows can move, copy, rename and delete files and folders, providing that you give them access to the relevant storage sites.  Typically you might use Power Automate to save data in SharePoint, OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive or any other cloud storage medium.
Email servers If you use a cloud-based app like GMail or Outlook to manage your messages, you can link to it to download emails, save attachments and create rules for processing incoming emails (to give just a few ideas).
Social media Provided that you have the security rights to connect to a social media platform, you can interrogate it.  A typical use of this might be to monitor Twitter for a particular hashtag's use.
Collaboration Obvious collaborative software to play around with in flows would be Teams (so you could automatically add approved holidays to your organisation's Teams calendar, for example).

The best way to see what you might use a Power Automate flow for is to have a look at some of the template flows provided:

Template flows

A (very) small sample of templates for flows that you can create in Power Automate.

Another good way to understand what you might do within a Power Automate flow is to have a look at some of the connectors available:

Popular connectors

Some of the most popular things you might connect to are OneDrive, Excel 365 and SharePoint.

Crucial to Power Automate is the concept of triggering flows with actions:

Some triggers

Just a few ideas for things you could do to trigger a flow.

 

Any flow consists of a range of possible actions, and this is where Power Automate becomes more like its sister program Power Automate Desktop:

Some Excel actions

Some of the actions that you can do for Excel Online, for example.

 

What the above shows is that you would typically learn Power Automate Desktop to automate things that you do from your desktop computer and Power Automate to automate things that you do in the cloud, although there is some overlap between the functionality of the two products.

10 things our courses include

Each of our scheduled courses (whether classroom or online) includes:

  1. Small course sizes - we have a maximum of 6 people on each classroom or online course.
  2. A trainer! And not just anyone - our courses are only ever given by full-time Wise Owls.
  3. Full colour courseware and exercises of oustanding quality.
  4. A no cancellation guarantee (once you've booked and confirmed your training course, it will run).
  5. A one gigabyte USB stick, containing course files, answers to exercises and (by the end of the course) your answers too, together with a nice pen.
  6. Unofficial help after the course (although we don't have a dedicated post-course support line, in practice trainers will be happy to answer the odd ad hoc question after a course has taken place).
  7. A certificate sent out digitally or in paper form (your choice) after each course, together with (for tailored courses) the trainer's thoughts on how the course went.

In addition, our classroom courses also include:

  1. A computer for each delegate (obviously).
  2. Lunch out each day at a local restaurant (chosen on the day of the course, after discussion!).
  3. Unlimited refreshments during the day, including Tassimo or Nespresso coffee and a range of biscuits and snacks to keep you going through those dark afternoon hours.

Still not convinced? You can read hundreds of testimonials to the quality of our training (all attributed and added in the last 3 years.

Scheduled Power Automate and PAD training dates

Here are the next Power Automate and PAD courses we have scheduled:

Course Dates Days Venue Price Booking
Power Automate Desktop Mon/Tue 27-28 January 2025 27-28 Jan 2 Online £875 Book places
Introduction to Power Automate Tue/Wed 28-29 January 2025 28-29 Jan 2 Online £875 Book places
Fast track Power Automate Wed/Fri 29-31 January 2025 29-31 Jan 3 Online £1,350 Book places
Introduction to Power Automate Wed/Thu 05-06 February 2025 05-06 Feb 2 Online £875 Book places
Introduction to Power Automate Wed/Thu 26-27 February 2025 26-27 Feb 2 Online £875 Book places
Power Automate Desktop Thu/Fri 27-28 February 2025 27-28 Feb 2 Online £875 Book places

All prices exclude VAT. If you can't see the dates you want, don't forget that you always have the option of arranging onsite training at your offices (we'll even provide the computers and projector).

Other Power Automate and Power Automate Desktop training resources

There are many ways in which we can help you learn Power Automate and PAD!

Exercises

You can test your knowledge of Power Automate and of Power Automate Desktop with these exercises.

Blogs

We have the following blogs on Power Automate to help you.

Videos

We have the following Power Automate videos available.

Tips and tricks

Have a look at our Power Automate and Power Automate Desktop tips and tricks.

Training venues

Courseware manuals

You can sample or license the following courseware manuals.

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