I would LOVE to see more long-form Power Automate Desktop tutorials like this. A lot of the videos online focus on just the web version of the app. Plus there's so much to learn that seeing how things are done, what steps are taken to accomplish tasks & solve problems, really helps cut the learning curve. I spent all day trying to automate part of a process in my business. Took me about 10 hours to figure it out. Watched a video that gave me a few ideas, then I went back in & recreated that flow from scratch using a new method in 20 minutes. 10 hours vs 20 minutes. That's a 30x improvement in my speed at using this tool. That's the real value of videos like this!
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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!
@ivanbork41752 жыл бұрын
Dear Dave Just start exploring the possibilities in Power Automate, watching a lot of KZfaq and I have to say, this is by far the best explained example I have seen. Thank you very much
@colblair20103 жыл бұрын
Finally some great content on Power Automate Desktop that is not just repeating simple examples from the Microsoft website, but does something useful! Well done and keep on posting, as there is so little useful stuff on MS PAD...
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
Thanks!
@vigyaninctutorials-makingt66933 жыл бұрын
I second that! Thanks for a great video.
@mrzeetx2 жыл бұрын
Fantastic video! I just watched your video and was able to build my own automation quickly. Definitely subscribing and recommending to others. Love how you take the time to even work through the issues and talk about what you did. Thanks Dave!
@DaveTheRPAGuy2 жыл бұрын
Great to hear! Thanks!
@scarletshivers2 жыл бұрын
Found your channel because I'm currently working on a Blue Prism project, and I absolutely love your videos! Keep it up
@NickWindham3 жыл бұрын
Great video. Please keep doing more on Power Automate. I’m stoked about this tool. I was able to automate a repetitive task I do within 30 of installing the program with no code.
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
That’s the beauty of PAD! Glad to hear it’s working well for you!
@georgemoore86413 жыл бұрын
This is, by far, the very best walk-through on Power Automate I've seen! I really feel as though we are learning the program together - having to figure out the right choices to make each selection work the way we planned/hoped, running intermediate tests of the "code" to uncover any errors before moving on. Your video works exactly the way I work. Thank you for your knowledge AND for taking the time to help the rest of us get a handle on Power Automate.
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
Awesome! Thanks for letting for letting me know!
@paniarabinda2 жыл бұрын
Great job Dave...Really loved
@futurebusinesssolutionsinc66173 жыл бұрын
Nicely done Dave! I'm glad you published as-is, even after the JQuery revelation. PA Desktop is pretty cool. They def have a lot of work to do but, I agree that the Big 3 are going to be feeling the heat before too long.
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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!
@sanaullahraisofficial2 жыл бұрын
Wow its great, But with power automate you can do any task, I created flow for posting on site,like getting data from source site, file uploading and downloading, image uploading etc., one thing I don't like about power automate, If you change the lcd or PC, It's not gonna work, You have to readjust the mouse pointer, and selecting UI again.
@DaveTheRPAGuy2 жыл бұрын
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.
@reginaldbal3 жыл бұрын
Thanks for sharing this great tutorial Dave. I especially liked the clarification around the selector builder.
@zdahnpitcher9864 Жыл бұрын
Hi Dave... I just learned how to add Pressing "START" button in a very easy way. Add the UI element for START button and replace content on text editor option with -- button:contains(Start). Hope this helps. Again thanks
@bclumeck3 жыл бұрын
Great job! Would be great if you do more Power Automate Desktop videos.
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
Thanks! I plan to!
@ASkepticalHumanOnYouTube3 жыл бұрын
I second third and fourth this!
@Tommyxxxkardon3 жыл бұрын
Great video. Another way to avoid deleting rows in an execel is to use the PAD function "get first empty row" to know when data ends.
@Tommyxxxkardon3 жыл бұрын
Sorry... i seen now you actually used it ;)
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
@@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.
@PaulieM3 жыл бұрын
Really decent demo, I’m pretty decent with Power Automate web but haven’t really checked out Power Automate Desktop much yet. Great intro.
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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.
@jhewitthunt3 жыл бұрын
Really useful video Dave. I'm no expert with these sort of tools, but I'm trying to get my head around the slightly more complex side of PAD. There were some really interesting tips in you video I haven't seen anybody else show. So thanks! Just subscribed. Hoping to see more PAD tutorials from you 👍
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
Thanks! And yeah I plan to do more. I just gotta find time. =)
@vinodhkumar21563 жыл бұрын
Great Video Dave. Your Videos are Awesome. I learned a lot on Blue prism from you. And now started PAD. Thank You!!!
@andreadipeere15803 жыл бұрын
Hi Dave. The video was very informative. I am a beginner in automation and hope to see more of your content.
@darylwilliams8962 жыл бұрын
Cheers Mate, used a lot of that.
@janvanhaver69703 жыл бұрын
Great video Dave, and you did help at least one person get a better understanding of some of the features!
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
Haha awesome!
@janvanhaver69703 жыл бұрын
@@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.
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
@@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!
@static023 жыл бұрын
Excellent video Dave! The flow and content was brilliant.
@Poseidon3393 жыл бұрын
Love it, I just downloaded Power Automate and am messing around with it.
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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.
@colleenrodakowski4423 жыл бұрын
14:45 I could be wrong, but I think its because there is two steps in between this automation software and the code of the excel spreadsheet. So the percent signs are actually pulling data from Excel's code, and making it a variable WITHIN power automate. Basically %First Row% - 1 (would be the value of the first row minus an integer of 1) whereas %First Row-1% is first row minus one space in Excel
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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.
@colleenrodakowski4423 жыл бұрын
@@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.
@tech-visionary3 жыл бұрын
Spot on and great work Dave...very enlightening
@herestoimprove13433 жыл бұрын
Thank you for sharing this, like the enthusiasm as well. Learnt couple of new things.
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
Awesome! Thanks!
@RDiazJimenez3 жыл бұрын
@Dave Thanks for the tutorial. AFAIK In order to get the web page elements you need to install the power automate browser add-on
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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.
@RDiazJimenez3 жыл бұрын
@@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!
@davidlinton41272 жыл бұрын
Great Video Thanks.
@jatinnandwani66782 жыл бұрын
Thanks so much
@shahidwani64452 жыл бұрын
Sir, js alert ok button is not being pressed after setting it to ok in submit button advanced settings.
@DaveTheRPAGuy2 жыл бұрын
Could you explain a bit more? I’m not sure I understand what’s not working for you or what you’re trying.
@shrutiharlalka55932 жыл бұрын
Hello, I just saw some of your videos on desktop flow those are amazing. I need your help in a task as i am unable yo fetch the url link in data extraction, working on desktop flow. Can u please help me out?
@DaveTheRPAGuy2 жыл бұрын
Apologies for the super late response. Are you still having this issue? (2 months later haha)
@martinpandopoemape9673 жыл бұрын
Hi, just one question, when you submit the form and get a window with a yes or no question, how do you select one of those items, Im trying with all the tools and the RPA doesnt respond
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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.
@jg20773 жыл бұрын
And here is that other video I promised kzfaq.info/get/bejne/q6uXfa99rajQiok.html This one automatically organizes music album files into their respective and automatically created folder. And it does this for all the alubms. So amazing to see it execute and do it all automatically. Hopefully I have this walk through video for other users and anyone who is interested in Windows Automation. Let me know if you get any questinos that I can help with.
@manishbansal52552 жыл бұрын
How to fill data in combo box from Excel through automation It not working with excelrow
@DaveTheRPAGuy2 жыл бұрын
What exactly are you having trouble with?
@StephanOnisick Жыл бұрын
Nice Job. Can't figure out why I can't edit my UI Selectors.
@DaveTheRPAGuy Жыл бұрын
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.
@bakshusyed19463 жыл бұрын
Thank you very much....
@amanuelgashu21973 жыл бұрын
Hi Dave thank you very much Quick question the are you able to spy on the "Start" bottom to begin the challenge. I can't seem to get PAD to remember the UI element!
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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
@amanuelgashu21973 жыл бұрын
@@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???🙏🏿🙏🏿🙏🏿
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
@@amanuelgashu2197 yeah I was thinking about making a quick video showing my edits there. I’ll try to get to that this week. Thanks!
@villanuevapaulryan99833 жыл бұрын
Thank you, this helps alot.
@ChakaHamilton2 жыл бұрын
Hi, I watched this video and after following along and successfully getting it to work, I decided to try my own challenge. I wrote a working flow that uploads the data from my glucose monitor to tidepool. Their application automatically loads their webpage with the data from the meter. EVERY up to this point works and took about 20 minutes. There is one UI element that I saved from the site which is a checkbox. however my flow can not see the chrome instance open from "outside". PUT simply. if your flow opens an application that has a button that opens a website the flow wont be able to detect the active website instance. I am sure there is a command to check the system for active web browser open I just don't know where that is. Any thought on how to check for active web browser?
@ChakaHamilton2 жыл бұрын
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.
@DaveTheRPAGuy2 жыл бұрын
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.
@ChakaHamilton2 жыл бұрын
@@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.
@yeraldo053 жыл бұрын
Great content! I was a quick question, what's the main difference between Power Automate Desktop and Power Automate Attended RPA $40 if both are RPA?
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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.
@lensleader2 жыл бұрын
And you get the Ai functionality on the higher tear
3 жыл бұрын
good job, thanks
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
Thanks!
@aniketmohod78222 жыл бұрын
Can we ON/OFF "Track changes" Option in Word File (situated on SharePoint Online) using Power Automate?
@DaveTheRPAGuy2 жыл бұрын
Yeah, that’s easy to do with Power Automate Desktop if you have the word document open in the screen.
@aniketmohod78222 жыл бұрын
@@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?
@DaveTheRPAGuy2 жыл бұрын
@@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
@aniketmohod78222 жыл бұрын
@@DaveTheRPAGuy thanks 😉
@user-gb6kb5re7y3 жыл бұрын
Instead of doing this in a browser form, can this be done through a piece of software that is tailor made / bespoke?
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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.
@user-gb6kb5re7y3 жыл бұрын
@@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?
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
@@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.
@alfredpereira91523 жыл бұрын
Hey bro what about hitting on the start button.
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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
@loubloom1533 жыл бұрын
Can we trigger using key or key combo? Like Logitech ghub or Razer synapse? Thanks 😊
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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).
@loubloom1533 жыл бұрын
@@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.
@user-mfsc-20242 жыл бұрын
could i launch browser in headless mode ?
@DaveTheRPAGuy2 жыл бұрын
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?
@LoveThroughLau3 жыл бұрын
this was helpful yes thank you , i just am struggling with the take screenshort feature , its so hard. please help with that for web
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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)?
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
Nevermind, I see the action 'Take screenshot of web page'. I assume that's what you're trying. I'll try it too.
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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
@nivinilvlogs3 жыл бұрын
Awsum!!!
@robertgrzelak33503 жыл бұрын
Thank You for this tutorial! If You could do in PAD a flow contains SQL Server query to Excel and that data from Excel to outlook e-mail body with HTMLformatting, it would be wonderful :-)
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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!
@roshunepp3 жыл бұрын
I'm working on doing just this! I just figured it out in python and then MS comes along and boom! Near obsolete, lol 😅😭
@onurerdogan22363 жыл бұрын
how can ı upload image from csv url column
@DaveTheRPAGuy3 жыл бұрын
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?
@onurerdogan22363 жыл бұрын
@@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.