To reduce the environmental impact and contribute to sustainability efforts, ISCA will contribute our part by eliminating the printing of course materials for selected courses with effect from 2023. Tips: To make your paperless learning experience more enjoyable, you may bring along a digital device such as a Windows based laptops or tablets to read your online materials during the class. QR code will be provided in the class for you to download the materials in PDF. Join us and be a Difference Maker!

 

This course aims to introduce participants to Power Automate Desktop, a platform to automate simple and repetitive tasks.

In this two-day introduction to Power Automate Desktop, participants will learn to create Flows, which can automate repetitive tasks. Power Automate is a development environment maintained by Microsoft for people who want to be more efficient and effective. It can automate tasks by:

• Interacting with specific software
• Interacting with files and file systems
• Performing recorded actions
• Using AI to recognise different portions of your screen

If you have always wanted to save time and improve your workplace efficiency, this course is for you!

Programme Outline

Participants will first concentrate on the fundamentals of working with Power Automate Desktop. They will get acquainted with the user interface and learn to understand flow diagrams and how they visually represent a task. Through this process they will briefly be introduced to different types of Flows, including the focus of today: Desktop Flows. Then, they will gain hands-on experience creating flows interacting with software and file systems to automate repetitive tasks, such as updating ledgers or collating data.

Introduction to Power Automate

Gain a better understanding of what Power Automate is and how to use Flows

• Understand the difference between Power Automate Web and Desktop
• Learn and navigate the user interface
• Understand Flow diagrams and how they visually represent a task
• Learn about the different types of Flows
• Introduction to Robotic Process Automation

Building Desktop Flows

Introduction to Power Automate Desktop, a non-web version of Power Automate that uses Artificial Intelligence to interact with your screen – just like Excel macros, but for all software on your computer!

• Basics of Building Desktop Flows
  • Variables
  • Conditionals
  • Lists and Loops
• Excel and Datatables (spreadsheets inside Power Automate)
  • Hands-on: error-checking ledger data
  • Hands-on: merging invoice data
• Using the Recorder to interact with legacy accounting software
  • Hands-on: account creation for new customers/suppliers
• Interacting with Files and Folders
  • Hands-on: checking for new ledger data (and appending it if needed)
  • Hands-on: bulk creation of invoices
  • Hands-on: read ledger data and take conditional action
• Interacting with Web platforms
  • Intro to HTML and how we interact with it
  • Web Scraping
  • Hands-on: extracting specific data from the web with regular expressions
  • Data in images: using Optical Character Recognition
  • APIs and JSON data

Evaluation and Adoption

A realistic look at the viability and steps needed to adopt Power Automate Desktop for individual and enterprise use.

• Adoption Tips
  • Hidden costs
  • Identifying optimal tasks
  • Challenges and potential pitfalls
• Adoption Rate
• The Future of Automation

Training Methodology

This course will alternate periods of lecture with hands-on activities. We believe strongly in differentiated, hands-on learning. For a learner, no amount of listening to lectures about “how to program” can beat the learning experience of putting hands onto keyboards and creating meaningful, tangible projects. We aim to design our lessons and workshops to be hands-on, highly participative, and with tangible, concrete outcomes, so that participants will be engaged at all times: programming, tinkering with hardware, looking up solutions, or trying to solve a problem. Such hands-on workshops are naturally more time-consuming to prepare and more difficult to deliver, but we strongly believe that this is the best way for participants to learn the material effectively, and will elicit the best learning outcomes.

Our goal is to ensure participants have enough skills to embark on future projects of their own, rather than just copying and pasting code to see things work. In our classes, learners will be carefully guided through the basic concepts, before being challenged to apply these concepts to create applications they can be proud of and, more importantly, use for future reference.

Our curriculum is designed by a team of trained teachers with real classroom teaching experience in MOE schools, and taught by trainers who possess actual programming experience from developing electronics and applications for startups and companies. We aim to adapt the best teaching materials available from all over the world, while supplementing them with best practices from our industry experience, to create the most effective programming courses for learners of all levels.

Closing Date for Registration 

1 Week before Programme or Until Full Enrolment

Intended For

Accounting professionals looking to add automation to their workplace. This course assumes no prior coding experience. Power Automate is a no-code or low-code tool that is similar to other Microsoft applications (such as Word or Excel). If you’re familiar with these, Power Automate Desktop has the same design and feel, which makes it extremely easy to pick up and get started!

Competency Mapping

Category 5 = 14.00 Hours

Programme Facilitator(s)