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Power Automate for desktop - Build 2401

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This article describes the new features, improvements and fixes to existing functionality that are included in this build.

Visit the Power Automate Blog to stay up-to-date on the latest news!

Installer version 2.40.150.23355 - Microsoft Store version 11.2401.28.0 updates

New Features

  • In addition to adding actions from the actions panel, you can now also use the suggested actions panel (in preview), which leverages AI to generate a list of actions that you could use as the next steps in your flow. This functionality is only available in US environments for work or school account users.

  • Blank values are now supported in Power Automate for desktop, in addition to empty text string values that were already available.
    Input variables can now be marked as optional, using the new toggle parameter called ‘Mark as optional’ that allows makers to assign them with a blank value.

  • Power Automate for desktop now supports single sign-on, so that users can sign in faster with the account they used to sign in to their Windows session.

  • The following dedicated actions for Word are now available under the new respective group of actions, allowing you to perform certain activities out of the box:

    • Launch Word
    • Attach to running Word
    • Save Word
    • Close Word
    • Read from Word document
    • Write to Word document
    • Insert image in Word document
    • Find and replace words in Word document

  • The action Update work queue item processing notes has now been introduced under the ‘Work queues’ group of actions, to enable the respective functionality out of the box in desktop flows.

  • A new action called Create HTML content is now available under the ‘Text’ group of actions, enabling the creation of HTML content via the embedded editor.

  • A new action called Attach is now available under the ‘SAP automation’ group of actions, allowing you to attach the running SAP GUI application to an SAP instance.

  • A new operation called Create new document set is now available under the SharePoint cloud connector.

Enhancements & Improvements

  • In the actions Update work queue item and Requeue item with delay, the toggle option ‘Clear processing notes’ has now been added as a new input parameter. In addition, the value ‘Processing timeout’ has also been added as a new Status option in the Update work queue item action.

  • The toggle parameter ‘Read body as HTML’ has now been added to the action Retrieve email messages from Outlook; when enabled, the ‘.Body’ property of the Outlook email message variable will contain the actual HTML body.

  • Action modals now come with a Maximize button, which enables their expansion to the whole screen.

  • In cloud connector operations that come with a dynamic output schema, the user experience has been enhanced with the proper warning, when the service fails to return the structure of an output object after configuring that operation.

Repaired Functionality

The following list details issues in Power Automate for desktop that are now resolved:

  • An unhandled error that sometimes occurred when cancelling the sign in dialog has now been resolved.

  • A flow initialization error that occurred when trying to open a flow that contains an unknown wait action has now been resolved.

  • After selecting the option ‘Capture image with custom delay’ in the Images pane, deleting the default value and using the arrow key to increase the value now works as expected.

  • The behavior of the variable picker control, when used in datagrids, has been enhanced to avoid performance issues.

  • Running an invalid/erroneous child flow from a parent flow now throws out the proper actionable error message.

  • When trying to add a new custom module that contains invalid actions via the Assets Library, the module is not loaded, and an error message is shown, containing the invalid action details.

  • Variable type mismatch errors regarding output variables now do not occur, when the respective actions do not run (i.e. when included in a condition that is not true).

  • An issue with the flow designer not launching (Flow initialization error) for flows, which contained custom actions and were saved in version 2.36 or older, after updating from v.2.36 (or older) to v.2.38 (or later), has now been resolved.

  • Using the reserved keyword ‘as’ in an input variable name now throws the proper error message.

  • An issue with the editing performance of flows that contained several subflows and multiple calls to those subflows is now resolved.

  • An error occurring when selecting the option ‘Values of named cells’ and ‘Named cells’ in the actions ‘Copy cells from Excel worksheet’ and ‘Paste cells to Excel worksheet’ respectively is now resolved.

  • An issue that occurred, when trying to expand the UI elements tree of the Google Chrome browser in the UI element inspecting tool, has now been resolved.

  • A timeout issue that occurred, when trying to use the ‘Extract data from web page’ action including a pager, while using the IE mode in the Edge browser, has now been resolved.

  • An upgrade issue that occurred, when trying to install the latest version of the Power Automate agent for virtual desktops on top of an older one, has now been fixed.

  • The offline Firefox web extension has now been updated to version 2.39.0.19.

Other announcements

  • The Text Analytics actions (Detect language, Key phrases, Sentiment) under the ‘Microsoft cognitive’ module are going to be deprecated soon.

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