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.
#office365 #powerautomate #microsoft
What was your time? Please post it here in the comments 👇
Hi, I have issue in extracting data from Amazon when I select text element it doesn't extract all data when I select same element it exract data in other column.. Pls help
The best Power Automate teacher who has ever existed!
I am getting the below error and I can't figure out where I have messed up
Correlation Id: d90cee22-e672-42b2-93cb-655e046fbfa6
Form field with selector 'input[ng-reflect-name="labelFirstName
labelLastName
labelCompanyName
labelRole
labelAddress
labelEmail
labelPhone
"]' not found.
to speed up to maximum go on advanced of populate text field and disable "Wait for page to load", it is unecessary to be activated while do writing operation.
Hej Anders
Virkelig fed video! – Især den sidste del med Dynamic Selectors.
Jeg kommer helt sikkert til at implementere dette i mit flow i næste uge.
Tak!
Man, I’m struggling with selectors. I’m doing exactly as you said, but in my case the browser never recognizes the selector! What can I do?
Very good video! Thank you for sharing with us. Do you have video in Power Automate of the RPA Challenge on RPA Stock Morket?
"choose a you ah el". I don't have meaning comment so leaving this one.
I got the same dynamic selector value problem few days ago. It's easier to use F12 instead of reading the web page property to parse for the text.
Is it possible to do this with power automate from the cloud?
86075 milliseconds
Each populate text field seemed to take about a second. No idea why so slow.
Really good content!! Thank you so much
Excelent video. Great learning and quality. Thank you very much. My robot time: 28 seconds.
Thank you very much again. I re-training with your video (all of 11 video). It help me to improve my knowledge for Power Automate Desktop. I really appreciate it. ❤💯
5319 milliseconds
Need help, Have very simple use case i.e. check if URL is up or not, below is working fine when I have a valid URL but if I provide an invalid URL then Flow is not going to Error condition where I created subflow
with a message showing URL Not Accessible
Launch new Microsoft Edge brower
If windows contains -> Captured UI element to check if we can see a image
Display message, URL is up
End
Could you please show how would you do it without using first free row/ column activity? How can we avoid extra 1000 rows without manually deleting them?
2238 milliseconds
1647MS
so I got 6.2 seconds in power automate, doing it the same way basically.
for fun I tried in java and got 6.1 seconds. The development time is 10x faster in PA of course. Here is the video to it : https://youtu.be/RthsA-WgKvg
I put a link to your video in the description.
Thanks for the great introduction
does the challenge include downloading the excel file as well? in that case you need to dynamically figure out how many rows you really have..
It is just like cooking.
You can read a recipe and try to imagine how to do it.
If you watch the Chef do it in real life you can get so much more out of it.
Hats off!
Thank you 😊!
please do video on python scripting with PAD
Anders, I love your videos and the way you teach. You have helped me a lot, thank you so much. 😊
I have a question in the construction of the selector: is it possible to inform more than one property of the element in the selector? like in Xpaths, for example:
//*[@data-controller="modal" and @data-target="#site-search"]
excellent job please keep it up👍
67757 milliseconds
Excellent video, thanks
very helpful, I uesed to record steps bu got many run time errors, this video is more clear.
4899 milliseconds – my computer isn't that fast…
Great work! I've been able to learn a lot watching your videos. But I'm currently working on a personal automation project and I need to create a pivot table in excel from power automate. Do you have any suggestions on how I could go about that?
Hey @Anders 🙂Hope you're doing well. Amazing work here by the way. LOVE it. I was curious if you've competed in any RPA hack-a-thon events?
Lots of Love form India. You are awesome. Although I have not tried this yet but it was so interesting I saw it 2 times already. So many things i learnt. I will definitely give it a try 🙂 thank you so much for the great content.
Thank you again for this video in which you show how to effectively use selectors in webpage. Best for the End how to use List in PAD. is it ok after my practice to publish the italian version of it?
Hi Anderson, you are doing really great..Hats off to your videos
RPA Challenge! Noice! Watching the automation of this website never gets old. It's so satisfying to watch. =)
Wow, this seems similar with UFT also, but less coding.. 😊
Im looking for a good RPA tool for QA, will u recommend this PowerAutomate over UIPath?
Hello Sir, I saw your course on Udemy regarding REfeamework, I am completely new to this RPA field and have no prior knowledge or experience, I want to switch my career as it isn't paying enough and I am not learning enough, hence, someone suggested to me RPA Uipath, upon checking for jobs I got to know that almost all organisations demand REfeamework, so is your course enough to give all the experience required so that I can make a switch saying i have 1-2 years of experience in RPA with RE framework?…..I can't say as a fresher because I am working and I want to leverage all the suffering through these years and use it as experience on my resume letter.
My time was 4015 milliseconds. The video recording software slows down the performance 😣 I did it without recording and got 1985 milliseconds.