Empowering Citizen Developers to Utilize Copilot for Automating their Daily Desktop Tasks

Deenuji · ‎06-05-2024

Many people are aware that Microsoft consistently introduces the Copilot feature across all its products. Similarly, Microsoft has integrated Copilot capabilities with the Power Automate Desktop tool, assisting numerous citizen developers in automating their routine tasks.

Simple Use Case:

1. A user receives a daily email titled "Today's Sales Report with Date"

2. The user is to open the email, save the sales report as a .msg file on local drive,

3. Save attached Excel sales report in the specific folder.

Sample Email:

Let's explore how the Copilot feature assists citizen developers in creating automation workflows.

As a citizen developer, having installed Power Automate Desktop on my machine and activated the Copilot feature, I proceed to create a new flow titled "Email Automation" with help of Copilot.

Let's begin our interaction with Copilot by seeking assistance on "How to create a new flow?"

I have followed the Copilot instructions and created a flow titled "Email Automation," and my workspace now appears as shown below.

However, as a citizen developer, I still lack the knowledge on how to automate my specific use case. Therefore, I will rely on Copilot to guide me further, So I am breaking down all the instructions and seeking assistance as needed.

As an initial step, I am utilizing prompts such as "How can I read emails from Outlook and save them in .msg format to the local drive?" and have received a set of instructions to automate my email tasks.

I am now building my workflow as per Copilot recommendation.

1. Launch Outlook and Create Instance:

I searched for the 'launch action' in the action panel, found the 'Launch Outlook' action, and dragged and dropped it into the workspace, which automatically created an instance for it.

2 Retrieve Email Messages from Outlook:
Following the second instruction from Copilot, "Retrieve email messages from Outlook" is used to read all messages from the inbox.

3. Apply required filter:

Then, in accordance with Copilot's third instruction, I have entered my account details, and configured the Mail Folder and Subject contains details.

4. Process email messages in outlook

Following the fourth step of Copilot, I have included the 'Process Email Messages' action into my workspace, set up the necessary parameters, transferred the retrieved emails to the designated mail folder

5. Save Email:

Now it's time to save the email as a .msg file according to our use case. Copilot has also outlined these steps in its suggestion.

6. Closed Outlook as per Copilot recommendation

I have just realized that I forgot to save my sales report Excel attachments. I will utilize Copilot's assistance to save the email attachments to local folder.

I asked Copilot how to save an email attachment from Outlook, and it provided the appropriate steps to save an attachment from an Outlook email.

Now as per Copilot response, I reconfigured "Retrieve email messages from outlook" action and specified where I need to store the sales report excel file in my local folder.

Thanks to Copilot's guidance, I've managed to create my workflow seamlessly, and it's functioning perfectly.

Output:

We can utilize Copilot to aid in scripting languages (excluding .Net script) for automation tasks in Power Automate Desktop.

How it works for PowerShell?

Use case: Rename file in specific local drive

Prompt Used: how can I rename a file in a specific folder and use current name and new name as power automate desktop variables?

The generated scripts seem promising, and Copilot's capability to produce them is incredibly beneficial for many citizen developers.

@PowerAutomateDesktop