August 19, 2021

Power Automate Desktop and PDF Actions

Every month I receive my utility bill and because my supplier doesn't provide a way to pay it online, they send me a PDF with all the usage details including a page to pay the bill. It uses a system in Italy known as "Bollettino Postale", it can be paid in person in post offices or online (Poste Italiane website).
Example:



Because I pay it online I need to manually copy some information from it (amount, payment reference, ...) and fill a form. It takes me few minutes to do but inside the PDF I receive this "bollettino postale" is not horizonal but vertical, when you need to be sure that you copy some numbers rotating the head is not the best approach :)
So I asked around and my friend Joel Lindstrom suggested to check Power Automate Desktop because it has some PDF actions, like extracting a page from a PDF. The page that I need to extract and rotate is usually the last one.
Sadly Power Automate Desktop doesn't have the actions I need, so I searched and I found this idea regarding the page count (PLEASE UPVOTE IT !!!)

It should not be a difficult action, you provide as input the PDF file and it should return a variable containing the number of pages, in this way I can extract the last page or the previous one. There are some workarounds (like this one) but an action would be simpler.

My second requirement is to rotate a PDF (or a single page of it), I didn't find an idea so I created one (PLEASE UPVOTE THIS AS WELL !!!)

Rotate PDF Clockwise or Counterclockwise

I found that I am not the only one with a similar need (like this post), of course this is more complicated than just counting the pages but if they provide a way to rotate all the pages (instead of just a specific one) it could be beneficial.

So if you like these ideas please upvote them and if you have an idea check if someone else suggested it first and in case create it.

Personal note: there is a way to automatically pay utility bills with a bank account (like I do with my internet provider) but for this supplier I prefer to pay manually.