Writing to Excel as plain text ?

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Posted on by UK_Mike

Hi All,

A little help on writing data to Excel formatted as plain text please, whats the syntax after

%DataFomWebPage%

Thanks, Mike.

Screenshot 2021-11-19 210028.png

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Power Automate Desktop

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Highboy 1,183 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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I don't know if that's possible, but if not you can do it by powershell.
This example sets column A to text (Just open the excel document through PAD)
Replace 'a' with a variable to make it more flexible.

To change a single cell use the example below
Change the Cells(2,1) to something like Cells(%row%,%column%)

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Hi @UK_Mike

You can try setting the text into Clipboard and then from Clipboard to Excel.
This could clear the formatting.
In-built actions are available in PAD for Clipboard activities.

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Highboy 1,183 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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That will not change the actual format of a cell in Excel.
Try it with 012345, and you will loose the 0

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Nope, not referring to number formatting, but formatting like font bold, color, borders, etc loose out when copied to clipboard.
Same works when pasted in notepad.

Will wait to hear back from @UK_Mike what type of formatting is the source data in that would like to be removed.

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UK_Mike on at

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Hi Guys,

Many thanks for all the conflicting solutions, just kidding 😂
Its a football ( soccer to my US friends ) results website.
Its a daily flow that gets todays Date minus 1, adds the resulted Date to the end of the URL, see below.
https://www.nowgoal4.com/football/fixture/?type=&f=ft1&date=2021-11-19

I extract only 6 of the columns from the table.
In Uipath this works flawlessly, writes into Excel as plain text and lets Power query do its magic, God I love Power Query !!!
Initially I never got round to figuring out how to write as plain text in PAD, so I just used the desktop recorder
to "select all cells, format as text, write to", been working great for months
So hence looking for a more robust solution.

Thanks guys 😊

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MichaelAnnis 5,727 Moderator on at

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I liked VJRs solution of setting it to the clipboard text, but if that didn't work, then I would write it to a text file, and then open Excel and open the text file in Excel.

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UK_Mike on at

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Hi Guys,

Clipboard text looked good but when written in Excel it all went into a single cell (A1).
Wrote to text file, opened it with Excel, all got written to Column A rather than 6 different colums.
Seperately, In a blank Excel when I open the text file as text/csv, it opens it in Power Query then I can save it as a table , which I do eventually anyway.
Ive 2 working options, leave the desktop recorder prep the Excel file then write to this OR save the web tables as text files, Power Query to pull it altogether.

Many thanks to all, much appreciated.

Mike

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