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Power Automate for desktop - Build 2202.4

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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!

Version 2.17.169.22042 updates

New Features

  • The console now comes with a new dropdown menu for Monitoring / Notifications, including a brand new monitoring window for console attended flow runs. This built-in window is able to:
    • Stop or pause a running flow.
    • Display the current status and duration of the running flow.
    • Show the name of the running flow, name of the current subflow, current action number and name of current action.
    • Minimize or move around the screen.

  • Display custom form is a new action in preview, under the ‘Message boxes’ group of actions, with which users will be able to create their own dialog (based on the Adaptive Cards technology). They will be able to combine the controls and elements of their choice into a single dialog window, via which they can display information or request input data that can be used in their automations.

    The custom form action comes with an intuitive designer for the users to configure their dialog according to their needs.

  • Two new ‘File’ actions are introduced:

    • Convert file to Base64
    • Convert Base64 to file

    A file is sent over the internet (typically via an API) as a Base64 encoded string representation. By allowing the users to easily convert a file to Base64 string and vice versa, file transfer over the internet is facilitated.

  • With the new action ‘Extract tables from PDF’, users will be able to automatically identify and extract all structured data tables from a PDF document, making it fast and easy to prepare and use tabular data from PDF files in their flow.

Enhancements & Improvements

  • There are several performance fixes coming in this release, on top of the ones made in January’s release, some of which improve the speed of:
    • Adding/deleting/editing/moving an action inside Main or any other subflow.
    • Navigating from one subflow to another.
    • Saving (Saving delay might also be caused from DLP or a slow network).
    • Enabling/disabling actions.
  • In every datatable variable, there is now a new property of datarow type, called ‘ColumnHeadersRow’, which holds the column names of the said table. This will enable writing these column headers in a row (for example, in Excel) in an easy and straightforward way, rather than relying on the existing ‘Columns’ property, which returns the column headers in the form of a list.
  • Users will now be able to rename flow variables or create a new input/output variable using an existing flow variable name, merging them via the respective confirmation dialog. If either one of the two original variables is sensitive, the merged variable also becomes sensitive.
  • Users can now easily copy a whole subflow from one desktop flow and paste it in the same or different desktop flows.
  • The thumbnails of the images, shown in the images repository and the image picker menu of the corresponding actions, have been adjusted, so that their various states are more consistent to each other.
  • The keyboard shortcuts for the options ‘Move up’ and ‘Move down’ have been simplified to a combination of three keys instead of the previous four, to enhance accessibility and ease of use.
  • A new tray icon has been introduced for Power Automate for desktop when updates are available, provided that they are not blocked by the Admin.
  • When signing in, the email address field now validates the provided email once the Sign-in button is pressed.
  • The automatic locking of the machine which hosts the execution of a flow is now prevented, to avoid the respective automation interruptions.
  • Selecting to add a new UI element via a UI or browser automation action now allows you to capture a single element, which automatically populates the action’s respective input parameter.
  • The option 'Selector with recapture' for a given UI element in the UI elements repository now allows the user to capture only UI elements of the same type (desktop or web respectively).

Repaired Functionality

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

  • Renaming a subflow now also updates the name in its ‘On block error’ usages.
  • Renaming a variable now also updates the selectors of the UI elements that use that variable.
  • The option ‘Find usages’ for a variable now also returns actions associated with a UI element, which may include a selector with that variable.
  • The parameter names and the summary of the ‘Set variable’ action have been adjusted, to better accommodate translations in other languages.
  • The action ‘Go to label’ now properly retrieves the list of available labels, when used in ‘Else if’ or ‘Default case’ blocks.
  • In the ‘Extract data from web page’ action, extracting an entire HTML table, which includes a ‘%’ character in a column name, no longer causes a syntax error after saving the action.
  • In the ‘Extract data from web page’ action, when extracting an entire HTML table, the extraction preview of the live web helper window no longer displays the column headers in the first row of the actual table data.

Other Announcements

  • In this release, we will be deleting the actions log file, found in the user’s local app data folder, after the completion of a flow run. This change serves the purpose of avoiding taking too much space of user’s disk capacity. For users that may want to keep those files, there will be the option of setting a registry key that will disable their cleanup.
  • In addition to the above, the production of execution logs (for console or cloud triggered runs) is limited to 10,000 log items – any more logs will be discarded.

Return to the [all version availability page](/power-platform/released-versions/power-automate-desktop#all-power-automate-desktop-versions).

If you have any feedback on the release notes, please provide your thoughts here.