Read our blogs, tips and tutorials
Try our exercises or test your skills
Watch our tutorial videos or shorts
Take a self-paced course
Read our recent newsletters
License our courseware
Book expert consultancy
Buy our publications
Get help in using our site
551 attributed reviews in the last 3 years
Refreshingly small course sizes
Outstandingly good courseware
Whizzy online classrooms
Wise Owl trainers only (no freelancers)
Almost no cancellations
We have genuine integrity
We invoice after training
Review 30+ years of Wise Owl
View our top 100 clients
Search our website
We also send out useful tips in a monthly email newsletter ...
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:
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!
The purpose of Power Automate Desktop is to create flows like this one:
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:
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:
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 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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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 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.
Each of our scheduled courses (whether classroom or online) includes:
In addition, our classroom courses also include:
Still not convinced? You can read hundreds of testimonials to the quality of our training (all attributed and added in the last 3 years.
Here are the next Power Automate and PAD courses we have scheduled:
Course | Dates | Venue |
---|---|---|
Power Automate Desktop | 27-28 Jan | Online |
Introduction to Power Automate | 28-29 Jan | Online |
Fast track Power Automate | 29-31 Jan | Online |
Introduction to Power Automate | 05-06 Feb | Online |
Introduction to Power Automate | 26-27 Feb | Online |
Power Automate Desktop | 27-28 Feb | Online |
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).
There are many ways in which we can help you learn Power Automate and PAD!
You can test your knowledge of Power Automate and of Power Automate Desktop with these exercises.
We have the following blogs on Power Automate to help you.
We have the following Power Automate videos available.
Have a look at our Power Automate and Power Automate Desktop tips and tricks.
Here are the venues for our Power Automate courses.
You can sample or license the following courseware manuals.
Kingsmoor House
Railway Street
GLOSSOP
SK13 2AA
Landmark Offices
99 Bishopsgate
LONDON
EC2M 3XD
Holiday Inn
25 Aytoun Street
MANCHESTER
M1 3AE
© Wise Owl Business Solutions Ltd 2024. All Rights Reserved.