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Why does my Power Automate Desktop flow become slow after execution?

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

My flow involves searching for a numeric code within two CSV files and an Excel spreadsheet. I read the CSV files using the "Read text from file" function because I found it to be faster than the "Open Excel file" function. This code also needs to be searched on a web query page, so it opens a browser instance and, when it finishes all the processes, closes the browser and the Excel document. However, it always happens that after executing this flow once, the Power Automate interface becomes slow, and I have to close the flow and reopen it to perform another execution with different values.

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Power Automate Desktop

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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First of all, there is an action called Read from CSV file that is specifically designed to read CSV files into data tables. You might want to try that.

Also, are you actually running your flow from the flow designer? That is only intended to be used for building and debugging your flow. When you actually want to run it properly, you should run it from the main Power Automate Desktop console, where you select the flow you want to run under "My flows" and click the run button on it. Try it - that's much faster.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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The "Read CSV from file" option, which stores the information in a data table, is a very slow function when searching for the numerical code within your data, lasting approximately one minute, unlike the function I use which takes approximately 10 seconds.
What you say about the run button, I will try, but I would have to do some extra steps to make a query every time I want.
1. Open the flow.
2. Write the new codes that I want to search for.
3. Click save.
4. Close the flow and run it from the main window.
Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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What you are describing is a very manual process. No idea why you would use Power Automate in general in this way.

But if you need to provide inputs to your flow, use a Display input dialog action to make your flow throw a pop-up with an input field where you can type in the values you need. Or provide them as inputs in some sort of an input file that your flow would read.

Running your flow in debugger is a slow way of running it. PAD is not designed to run fast in debugger and it will very likely never be.

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If I have answered your question, please mark it as the preferred solution. If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

I also provide paid consultancy and development services using Power Automate. If you're interested, DM me and we can discuss it.