Learn Automation With These RPA Tutorials

If you are new to robotic process automation and starting to learn about its capabilities and possible applications in your business, there are many WorkFusion resources that can be helpful for you. However, there is not always enough time to study the software thoroughly before using it. Sometimes, you just need to learn the basic capabilities of the new tool and start using it right away. Or maybe you just don’t like to study documentation and prefer learning by trial and error.

For such situations, we have selected several RPA basics video tutorials that will help you learn robotic process automation and start using it in practice faster.

Getting started with WorkFusion

Before automating your everyday tasks with RPA, learn about the basics of using Intelligent Automation Cloud from this short RPA tutorial. It tells you about installing the tool on your machine, its UI and primary approaches to automation. It also will show you how to run ready RPA examples that come with the basic installation and how to use advanced RPA learning guides that are available in WorkFusion Studio.

Surface-based automation

The surface-based approach is one of the most common in robotic process automation. Simply put, it means the bot looks for certain images on the computer screen and interacts with them. In Intelligent Automation Cloud, the surface-based approach is implemented via mouse and keyboard actions. This RPA tutorial will tell you how and when to use these actions and will show the process of automating a task with these actions in practice.

Variables and loops

Recorder variables

Variables are containers used to store data of different formats. In RPA Recorder, you can store data in special types of variables, known as Recorder variables, so you can easily use them in actions from the Actions Library. The tutorial below covers all types of variables available in RPA Recorder, as well as best practices for using them in your scripts.

Implementing loops

Implementing loops in your scripts will help make them more robust. You can program the bot to repeat actions several times, thus automating a large chunk of work with a shorter script that is relatively easy to create and maintain. See the video tutorial below to learn what types of loops you can implement in RPA Recorder and how you can iterate through complex variables using the For Each loop.

Web automation

Web group of actions

Intelligent Automation Cloud has a special group of actions for web applications and websites. Using these actions for web automation allows you to make your RPA scripts faster, more stable and robust. We have created a video tutorial that covers all basic tasks that people perform in web browsers: opening websites, typing and clicking on various elements on the web page, looking for information online, and saving it. It will show you how to:

• open URLs in different browsers
• paste text online
• click on buttons, links and other web elements
• save text from the page in variables
• save other information, such as values of the element’s tags

XPaths in web automation

To learn web automation on a more advanced level, you should familiarize yourself with XPaths, which are at the core of all web actions in Intelligent Automation Cloud. In this RPA tutorial, you will see how you can use XPaths in Developer Tools and how to create custom XPaths in creating RPA solutions for automating dynamic web pages.

Desktop automation

From the tutorials below, you will learn about automation approaches for desktop applications and special groups of actions for desktop automation available in the Actions Library.

Object-based automation

Object-based automation is the universal approach to automating desktop applications. It is based on an RPA bot’s ability to locate the UI elements of the applications by special UI selectors (CSS, Object selectors, XPaths) and interact with them just as a person would do. (We covered the topic of automating one of the most popular desktop applications, MS Excel, in one of our previous blog posts.)

The RPA tutorial below will show you how to use object-based automation and demonstrate an example of building a script by simply recording the actions you perform on the screen.

Excel automation

Automating user actions in Excel is one of the most popular uses of RPA. Apart from automating with the object-based approach, you can do it via special Excel actions from the Actions Library. With the help of these actions, you can open spreadsheets, copy/paste the data, and perform other actions instantly in the background. Watch this tutorial to see how to use these actions in a script.

Application actions

Special Application actions allow you to automate opening Windows applications and performing some basic actions with their windows: focusing on them, maximizing, minimizing, closing, etc. See an overview of “Launch Application” and other actions from the Application group in this video.

Optical Character Recognition

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is one of the most helpful features of Intelligent Automation Cloud, which allows digitizing data so it can be used by bots in business processes. It can recognize and extract text from images, PDF files and other documents. See how you can use the special OCR action in scripts in this RPA video tutorial.

We hope all these robotic process automation tutorials were helpful toward getting you started with Intelligent Automation Cloud. If you want to learn automation on a more advanced level, take our free online RPA training course, “Automating the Business Task.” It not only contains all the above and many other RPA training tutorials, but also links to product documentation and ready RPA examples that you can download and run to see automation in action.