Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hey there,

I tried to ask PAD (Power Automate Desktop) to open a PDF file and take the specific area, so I can extract the text from that area. Although I can set 'Run Application' to open the snipping tool. But I don't know how to the following steps (see attached)

Should I use send key to open 'Open file' in snipping tool? How can PAD (Power Automate Desktop) know which area I will take a snapshot and then extract the text? Should I use Add UI elements...sorry, I'm very new to Power Automate Desktop. Thanks for y'all help!

PAD Issues.docx

Categories:

Power Automate Desktop

I recommend trying to use PADs image/pdf extraction actions first before trying to do this with Snipping Tool.

I don't think PDF will have UI elements. I don't have Adobe Acrobat so if it gives you individual UI elements like the "Additional Shipper Info" then I would use "Take screenshot of UI element" -action on that and then use "Extract text with OCR" -action.

Try using Extract text from pdf and see what the output is. If the text comes out in easy to parse format then parse that text with regex. So if the wanted text "2787056" is preceded by "ADDITIONAL SHIPPER INFO" then its easy to use regex for that. So then you would use Parse Text and toggle on Regex and create regex that takes the text after ADDITIONAL SHIPPER INFO.

Or you can try Extract tables from pdf to see if that gives you one table that has column "ADDITIONAL SHIPPER INFO" and then just take the value from the first row on that column.