Desktop Automation: 4 Small Tasks to Automate for Big Impact

Having the right tool for the job can make any task a breeze. Sure, you can wash your dishes by hand, but using a dishwasher is much more efficient and lets you work on more important chores. Don’t you wish you had a tool like that in the office to take your most mundane, repetitive tasks and take them over? Enter desktop automation tools.

What is Robotic Desktop Automation?

With robotic desktop automation (RDA), you can solve a lot of the daily tasks that take up your time so you can focus on more value-adding tasks. Desktop automation tools act as a personal assistant, installing on a single machine for one user to automatically check boxes off your to-do list.

These powerful bots can help anyone from business to IT users, and because they take your most error-prone tasks, robotic desktop automation lets you work more accurately as well as efficiently.  Here are just some of the many ways to put desktop automation tools to work on tasks that may seem small, but add up for a big impact when you automate them.

1. Web Browser Automation

Do you ever have to log into a website to grab data to put into an Excel sheet? While a task like this may seem simple enough, time spent on doing this sort of repetitive, manual work can add up quickly. Luckily, you can use desktop automation tools for website automation tasks and let your desktop bot do the work for you.

Robotic desktop automation tools interact with the latest browsers at the graphical interface level—just like you—allowing you to let your robot assistant automate tasks involving logging into a website, clicking on links, selecting from a menu, and even typing into a text box.

2. Automated Data Scraping and Extraction

Gathering information from emails, PDFs, or other unstructured documents takes up a lot of time and is prone to errors. You could write custom scripts to scrape data, but that takes expertise and more time, and it’s hard to integrate with your processes.

With a desktop automation tool, you can automate data scraping to easily extract and transform all your most crucial data from just about any source. Plus, once your bot has extracted the data, you can further automate your business processes by sending the data directly into documents, reports, and critical business applications.

3. Report Generation and Distribution

Reports help you see all the data you need to make strategic decisions for your business. But many core applications like ERP systems, general ledgers, and CRM systems require manual intervention to compile reports. Why spend more time on gathering the numbers than you do on analyzing them?

Desktop automation tools can integrate directly with your critical business applications for automated report generation and distribution. Regardless of the data source, a great automation solution can help you create workflows that merge, process, and format your data to build intelligent reports.

4. Microsoft Application Automation

Whether you’re checking your email in Outlook, crunching numbers in Excel, or creating a document in Word, chances are you interact with Microsoft products a lot in a typical workday. Robotic desktop automation can help you out by automating all the tedious tasks you have involving Microsoft applications.

With Microsoft automation, you can generate Excel reports automatically, manage your SharePoint files without intervention, and even kick off a cross-platform process when an email arrives in your Outlook inbox.

Robotic Desktop Automation: Start Small for Big Results

The bottom line is that desktop automation tools free you from your most repetitive and mundane manual tasks. Not only saving you precious time but also helping you work more efficiently and accurately.

And with the right automation tool, you can easily scale from desktop processes to enterprise-wide workflows.