As said the RPA tools are generally engineered to run long repetitive processes to remove manual effort and introduce greater reliability due to accuracy and not going to make a cup of tea. The tools can either be ran locally - attended - or on remote machines - unattended. When running attended they can wait for the user to interact and then process information. For example an insurance company with 2 systems that aren’t connected, the user can press a button and the bot enters all of the information in the second system.
The tool we use will swap between desktop and web automation within the same flow. If you want to have a look at an RPA tool the Microsoft Power Automate Desktop is free, as is the Community Version of UI Path.
Some of the simple things people want to do is an advanced mail merge between Excel and Word, both power automate and UI path can do this with ease. Power Automate can do it in the cloud via APIs, you wouldn’t even have to run it attended. Another simple example people have are updating and manipulating Excel data to add formulas and change data structures, you can do this through macros and code, or with a few clicks in Power Automate.