Microsoft Power Automate Desktop is now free for Windows 10 Users

NOTE: Power Automate was previously known as Microsoft Flow.

 A few days ago Microsoft made Power Automate Desktop, its low-code, robotic process automation (RPA) tool, available to all Windows 10 users at no additional cost. To  be clear, Power Automate is only free for personal use - to share flows with others or to make use of AI components or cloud flows, you still have to upgrade to the paid version. To take advantage of the offer for your own use though, just search for "Microsoft Power Automate Desktop" and go to the website, click where it says "Download for free", then click on the downloaded file to install the software.

So, what is "Power Automate Desktop"? Power Automate allows anyone familiar with a particular business process to create an automated, repeatable workflow that can be triggered to perform that process for you. Along with creating workflows, users can also use Power Automate to send reminders about past due tasks, move data between systems based on a predetermined schedule, and talk to more than 275 data sources (or any publicly available API).

Basically, Power Automate is designed to help automate any business process that consists of a series of repetitive steps, such as downloading files from emails and  transferring them to a database. In addition to creating a flow that allows the computer to execute the entire process, you can have Power Automate guide a user from step to step along the way.

In fact you can create three types of flows:

• Event driven flows - Flows that you initiate with a trigger event of some type, followed by a series of actions joined by "connectors".
• Business process flows - Data-driven flows that consist primarily of components pre-chosen according to the data being processed.
• Desktop flows - Flows created by recording yourself performing a series of actions (basically the same way you recorded macros in MS Word or Excel).

One other important feature of Power Automate is its ability to add artificial intelligence to your flows (if you have a paid license). You can add four types of AI models to your flow:

• Form processor - Extracts particular pieces of text from the uploaded image of a form.
• Object detector - Identifies objects from an uploaded image and provides a count of the number objects present in the image.
• Prediction - Predicts whether or not something will happen based on previous historical data.
• Text classification - Categorizes text according  to some classification scheme, making the text easier to analyze. 

For further information and example flows, go to: 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/introduction-power-automate/