"Wait for shortcut key" - more than one key-combination

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Posted on by HReisinger

Hi,

I am currently building a Power Automate Desktop workflow where I am experiencing this issue:

- I want to use the "Wait for shortcut key" function

- according to the documentation, I can use single values (like: ctrl + A) and could also use "...multiple shortcut keys seperated by comma" (defined as "List of Text values" according to this documentation page)

- the aim of my workflow is, to either get 'ctrl + A' OR 'ctrl + F' as shortcut entry and use this info later in the workflow

- so I tried everything as input in the "Shortcut key" input field:

Ctrl + A,Ctrl + F --> error, is not accepted as definition
'Ctrl + A','Ctrl + F' --> error, is not accepted as definition
"Ctrl + A","Cctrl + F" --> error, is not accepted as definition
[Ctrl + A,Ctrl + F] --> error, is not accepted as definition

I would very much appreciate any kind of hint or help on how to solve this mystery...

Many thanks,

Harald

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Power Automate Desktop

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fraenK 2,125 on at

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List syntax is
%['Ctrl + A', 'Ctrl + C']%

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HReisinger 4 on at

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Thank you!

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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It looks like there is a limit of five shorcut keys. Is that correct? Is there any workaround?

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uuoocl 2 on at

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A request to remove the 5 shortcut limit has been submitted to Power Automate feedback. Please upvote the idea to bring it to the Power Automate team's attention.
Remove the 5 shortcut key limit from the "Wait for shortcut key" action · Community (powerautomate.com)

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manicplanet 2 on at

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One workaround would not get you more than 5 shortcut keys at once, but would allow you to press a sequence of keys and effectively have unlimited choices. Consider one of the first mapped shortcut keys as ‘more choices’ key. So the first keystroke gives you 4 options OR a way to access others. Chain multiple series of this, and you can get as many choices as you want; but it might look like

a

OR

F1
c

OR

F1
F1
F1
g

etc.

With practice, it gets pretty intuitive, especially if you group the sets of choices. Note that I do this with my ‘shortcut keys’ as simple one-key inputs, with no Ctrl or Alt etc.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @manicplanet ,
Great minds think alike. Actually, I've been doing it this way since I ran into the problem a few months back. It's still limited in that if you need more than nine actions, you then need a third combo key. However, the nice thing is that the second, third, etc. keys can be plain keys without modifiers like CTRL, etc. Of course, if Microsoft would just fix this, it would be even better.

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