Thanks! And I completely agree with you. I have the same issue when looking up videos on how to do stuff. That's why I like to show every single step I take even if it makes me look dumb. Hahaha!

Thanks!

I second that! Thanks for a great video.

Great to hear! Thanks!

That’s the beauty of PAD! Glad to hear it’s working well for you!

Awesome! Thanks for letting for letting me know!

Thanks, and I suppose it doesn’t make a huge difference, but I guess I technically should have said CSS Selectors instead of JQuery Selectors. I imagine those are nearly the same, but I cringe every time I see that I said JQuery haha!

It really depends on how you make your selectors. If it is image based, it's still possible to make it work on any PC or different resolutions. If you're using the recorder feature, then it's more likely to break which switching to another PC. But if you build out the selectors manually, you can make sure it's flexible enough to handle variations. But then this is exactly the problem with really any RPA tool. We gotta be careful to build automations that can handle screen or app changes as much as possible.

Thanks! I plan to!

I second third and fourth this!

Sorry... i seen now you actually used it ;)

@@Tommyxxxkardon Haha! No worries. The issue I found actually is that 'Get First Empty Row' would return something like 1011 because even that action thought there was data inside the empty cells. I think I'd have to get it to loop through the rows and read cell by cell until it finds a cell that is empty and then I'd use that row (or the one before) as the last row. My guess is that Microsoft will end up adding more actions for datatable and excel manipulation so I doubt this will be much of an issue for long.

Thanks! I need to try out Power Automate. I only used it a little bit when it first got rebranded from Flow to Power Automate.

Thanks! And yeah I plan to do more. I just gotta find time. =)

Haha awesome!

@@DaveTheRPAGuy you would happen to be planning a video on the intricacies of using the Selector Builder (as seen around min. 23 in this video), would you? That's definitely the thing I'm struggling with most.

@@janvanhaver6970 I was thinking about that. I don't know a ton about it either since it seems to be so different from other RPA tools. I'll put this on my list and we can hopefully learn together. =) Will probably look into it within the next couple of days and see what reliable information I can pass along in a vid. Thanks!

Noice! Come back and let me know if you have any issues with it or find anything interesting. I’m trying to learn what I can about the tool before I start suggesting its use in enterprise settings.

That’s definitely a good guess. I was super confused at the time, but I’ve since found that the way it works is that Power Automate Desktop will only do calculations within the percent symbols. If it’s outside the %% symbols then it is treated as literal text.

@@DaveTheRPAGuy Interesting note in regards to the UI elements not selecting as web-browser specific. I clicked for like a half hour straight, and no matter how many times I clicked it wasnt registering as a web-page element. Only after clicking the web-recorder, then closing out of the web recorder. Did my clicks finally register the elements as Web-Based.

Awesome! Thanks!

Thanks! And yeah absolutely! I don’t remember what I may have said in the video regarding that. And also it may not have been visible on screen, but the Browser extension was installed and enabled; I just didn’t have it pinned so it doesn’t up at the top right.

@@DaveTheRPAGuy You didn't mention it, but maybe for others struggling as I did to make it work, this comment may help! Looking forward for the next PAD video! Thanks again!

Could you explain a bit more? I’m not sure I understand what’s not working for you or what you’re trying.

Apologies for the super late response. Are you still having this issue? (2 months later haha)

Could you share a link or name of an application where I could see that? When I read your comment, my first thought is the issues I've run into with Blue Prism where a pop-up window needs to be attached to separately, but I wouldn't think Power Automate Desktop would have the same issue since it attaches in a different way.

What exactly are you having trouble with?

What part of it can you not edit? If you mean the syntax at the bottom, you need to set it as a custom selector first.

Just noticed I hadn't responded to this. Try this in your Selector Builder. You may have to change to manual input or whatever (turning off the visual editor): div:contains('Start') > button

@@DaveTheRPAGuy thank you!!!🙏🏿🙏🏿🙏🏿. You also mentioned on your latest vid that you "made it go way fast" do you think you can share that with us too???🙏🏿🙏🏿🙏🏿

@@amanuelgashu2197 yeah I was thinking about making a quick video showing my edits there. I’ll try to get to that this week. Thanks!

UPDATE: So I did figured it out Launch New Chrome -> Attach to running instance -> Attach to chrome tab: by title -> Tab Title voila! I'm finding that my years of using MS Access and macros really helps with my thought process when it comes to PAD.

Hahaha! Yeah honestly I find it kind of weird that the Attach to running instance option is inside the Launch New Chrome action. It seems like it should be a separate action on its own. It's at least not very intuitive to find.

@@DaveTheRPAGuy it definitely isn't too intuitive, and believe me, I found that option really by accident. After playing around with it for a full day I will say the learning curve isn't too steep. I think where I will probably stumble are the variables and how to use them.

Should be the same thing. I believe if you pay, you’re getting both Power Automate cloud flows as well as Power Automate Desktop desktop flows functionality. I’m still on the free version just using Power Automate Desktop, but as I understand it you can use Power Automate cloud flows to trigger desktop flows. I’ll probably sign up too at some point for a paid subscription and will be just as confused. Haha. Microsoft has changed the subscription model and such for Power Automate several times over the last few years.

And you get the Ai functionality on the higher tear

Thanks!

Yeah, that’s easy to do with Power Automate Desktop if you have the word document open in the screen.

@@DaveTheRPAGuy actually throughout entire process at certain point I need to disable it & then again turn it ON using Automate. Do you have any reference link?

@@aniketmohod7822 I don’t have any specific reference for doing that, but I would probably just create a sub flow that can turn the setting on or off and then use it throughout the flow

@@DaveTheRPAGuy thanks 😉

That’s a good question. It’s absolutely preferred to automate any business process using APIs or by building a new app etc, but the use case here is simulating when a web app doesn’t have APIs. Sometimes there’s other ways to handle it for sure, but usually that involves larger projects and approved integration. This way if a user has some set of steps they do every day, they don’t “have” to get a developer involved to automate it. Is it a good idea to automate the UI of an app? In my opinion, not really. But at the same time boring manual effort is worse.

@@DaveTheRPAGuy Thanks for the reply, I’ve been messing around with it today and when clicking on an input box on the app I’m getting an ‘edit’ option unlike the ‘input’ you got here in the video. Is there a way around this?

@@user-gb6kb5re7y is this a web app or a desktop app? If it’s a web app and doesn’t seem to be getting an HTML element, it could be automatically grabbing a UI element through accessibility features. Try holding CTRL and scroll the wheel on your mouse and it should cycle through selecting different elements around that spot.

I didn’t read the instructions. =) I fixed it here when I went back to make the same flow run faster: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/j611nLyIvsmnqI0.html

Like a hot key or keys such as Ctrl+Shift+S or something? Sort of. You have to have a desktop flow running already for anything to happen but you can start it and then use the action “Wait For Key Press” (or similar wording).

@@DaveTheRPAGuy thanks . I was looking for something like autohotkey without code, like press shift +a opens url in chrome and logs in to a site.

If by headless mode, you mean a special way of interacting with an invisible browser, then I assume no? But something I guess would be similar but maybe not the same thing is that I think you could launch the browser and then trigger it to immediately go invisible on the screen. Those actions exist in PAD, but what I don't know (haven't tried it) is whether the webpage interaction would work properly with the browser window invisible. It seems like if you used browser communication only (that is the native browser communication mode so that it's using only HTML/JavaScript/Query, then it seems like it it'd work, but I just haven't checked it to verify. This is an interesting idea. What would you say is the main benefit of doing this? To let an automation run in the background while a user continues to work? Or would it be speed or what?

Hmm, I haven't tried that in PAD yet. I'll look into that later today. And when you say you want to use that for the web, do you mean you want to take a screenshot of only the webpage (as opposed to the whole screen)?

Nevermind, I see the action 'Take screenshot of web page'. I assume that's what you're trying. I'll try it too.

I tried it out. It works for me. I might toss up a video later about this. For now, what I did was three actions: Launch new Chrome, Take screenshot of web page, Close web browser. In 'Take screenshot of web page', these were my inputs... Web browser instance: %Browser% Capture: Entire web page Save mode: File Image file: C:\Test\PAD_web_screenshot.png File format: PNG

Thanks for the suggestion! I will add that to my list of ideas. I only make one or two videos every couple of weeks so I can't say for sure if I'll be able to make that soon, but I will definitely write it down!

I'm working on doing just this! I just figured it out in python and then MS comes along and boom! Near obsolete, lol 😅😭

Where are you trying to upload the image? Are you saying you have a URL in a CSV file and you need to upload an image to that URL? Could you explain a bit more?

@@DaveTheRPAGuy I created a survey with images uploaded via Google Form. The images added via the survey are saved on the drive. When I want to view the survey results on google sheet, the link of my drive folder for the images appears on the sheet as a row.