Today, most small, medium, and large companies are adopting automation. Sometimes, introducing automation is not straightforward because of the state of the processes, as we discussed above. However, we should develop standards, practices, and approaches to identify suitable processes to automate based on the framework provided.
Pick a Few Tools to Start With
There are many RPA tools available in the market. After thinking about the critical points and the capabilities required, narrow your search for the perfect platform. Find the platform based on the capabilities, budget, and how you plan to scale.
Setting Up Your Environment
While we would like to cover every single approach in great detail, there’s only so much space in one Refcard. Hence, this section will focus on setting up an example RPA tool so that you can begin your RPA journey.
Registering for a Community Version
UiPath offers a free-of-charge community license that anyone can use for learning and building small automation solutions. Navigate to UiPath Cloud Platform, create your free account, and sign in to perform the following steps. Once you sign in, your screen should look similar to the following screenshot:

Installing UiPath Development Environment
On the Cloud platform, the right-hand side panel provides the option to download and install the development tool named UiPath Studio.
Configuring Licenses for Your Orchestrator
Navigate to the Admin page in the Cloud Platform and locate the Tenants Page. The Tenants page shows all the available Orchestrator tenants. Click on the “Edit License Allocation” option in the Tenant and assign all available licenses to the Tenant.

The number of licenses available to you may depend on the version. For example, the community version will have fewer licenses whereas trial and enterprise versions will have a higher number of licenses.
Configuring Orchestrator User
Click on the “Orchestrator” on the Tenants page or the home page to navigate to the Orchestrator. Follow the steps below to set up your environment:
- Navigate to Tenant and click on “Manage Access”
- Find your user, and click on the “Edit” option
- On the “General details” screen, provide the user roles, including username, first and last name, email address, etc.
- We would love to show how to enable both attended and unattended robots. However, for the scope of this Refcard, let’s only enable the attended robot for now. Click on the “Robot setup” option, enable “Attended Robot,” and finally, click on the “Update” button.
Now you have completed the user configuration. Next, let’s assign the user to a folder and complete the Orchestrator configuration.
Connecting UiPath Studio With Orchestrator
Open the UiPath Assistant from the Windows Start menu. Once the application is loaded, you will get an option to sign in. Sign in with the same account in which you created your Orchestrator instance. Now open the UiPath Studio, and you will have all the access needed to start building your first automation solution.
Creating the First Automation Project
There are many templates that you can select to start development. However, to keep it simple, create a blank process with any given name. Once you are in the created solution, you will have several panels available to interact.
The Solution panel contains all the files and folders in the solution. The Activities panel is where we mostly interact to drag and drop the required activities to build the automation workflow. Let’s do a simple Excel automation as our first project.
1. Create an Excel file as shown below:

Now, let’s try to find the total number of sales worth more than $2,500 and save them in a different sheet within the same Excel file.
2. Open the Main.xaml file from the Project panel
3. Search for “Excel Application Scope” and drag and drop the scope into the middle of the Design canvas
4. Configure the activity to point to the Excel file created
5. Place a “Read Range” activity (from Excel activities) within the Excel Application Scope
6. Create a new variable of type “DataTable” in the Variables panel
7. Configure the “Read Range Output” property in the Properties panel by providing the data table variable
8. Drag and drop a “Filter DataTable” activity
9. Click on the “Configure” button
10. In the “Filter Wizard” screen, provide the Input DataTable and the Output DataTable with the data table that we created
11. Configure the filter options as shown below:

12. Place a “Write Range” (via Excel activities) below the “Filter” activity
13. Configure the sheet name as “Sheet2”
14. Configure “Input DataTable” with the variable we used for the output of the “Filter DataTable” activity
15. Enable “Add Headers” from the Properties panel
Congratulations! Your completed workflow should look similar to the following:

16. Click on “Run project” from the Top Ribbon to execute the flow. Once complete, open the Excel file and check your output.
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