This video tutorial shows how to solve the RPA Challenge in Microsoft Power Automate for Desktop. The hands-on use-case is famous for going through important RPA concepts such as UI Elements and selectors, web automation, Excel, and optimization of your RPA flows.
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0:00 Intro
You'll learn to solve the RPA challenge in Microsoft Power Automate for Desktop. First, download the Excel book and inspect the sheet with data for the challenge. It's 7 columns and 11 rows, where the first is a header column. The data must be filled into input fields on the RPA Challenge page. Later we'll speed hack the solution to solve it quickly and apply reusability to the solution (one RPA best practice).
2:41 Read the Excel data
Use a Launch Excel action to open the Excel book with data. Provide the document path. Untick the Make instance visible parameter, as we don't need to see what's going on. Tick the Read-only parameter, as we don't need to write things back to the Excel sheet. Remember to use a Close Excel action so you don't lock your Excel book with Power Automate for Desktop. To find the range of data, we use a Find first free column/row action, which provides variables for the first free column/row after our data. The first problem occurs; it seems like we have 1001 rows for data and one column too much - we'll fix that manually (making sure we have good data quality). Now we can read the data with a Read from Excel worksheet. Remember to tick the First line of range contains column names in the advanced parameters, as the first line is headers.
10:50 Populate fields with the Excel data
We have read our data in Power Automate. Now launch a browser with the Launch new Chrome action. Use a For each action to iterate through each value in our Excel sheet (Data Table). The Populate text field on web page action is used to type into the fields. We refer to the CurrentItem and the column in scope to fill the correct data into the field. Add a Ui Element for the field and remember to rename it. Use a Click link on web page action to click the submit button. We open the Developer tools to find a CSS/jQuery selector for the fields and buttons, as this is part of the challenge.
38:55 The fastest RPA Challenge solution in Power Automate
We can do the challenge solution even faster. In the Click link of web page action, we untick the Wait for page to load parameter. In the Populate text field on web page action, we untick Emulate typing and Wait for page to load parameters. In the debugger, set the Run deal to 1ms, which is the delay between the actions of the flow.
41:41 Dynamic selectors in the RPA Challenge
This will not make your solution faster; in fact a little slower. But if you manage this concept, you'll get a lot better as an RPA developer. We create a dynamic selector in the UI Elements of Power Automate, so we only need to use one Populate text field on web page action. Add each selector to a list and use a For each action to iterate through each selector.
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