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Datatables Are Ridiculously Tedious To Manipulate (and small rant)

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Posted on by ExpeditorsSigma

Overall I am not very impressed with PAD... There are SO MANY bugs that it should be considered beta software! Web scraping is incredibly unreliable too.

Anyway, here are the main issues with datatables in PAD:

Inability to directly create an empty datatable. You have to do a ridiculous work around by creating an empty CSV and read it in...
Difficult to manipulate. Cutting out part, deleting, and adding data are all difficult to do! Way more difficult than it should be for an application that makes everything seem so simple...
Iterating over any variables that can be indexed is tedious and unintuitive. Variable notation in general is unintuitive (in my opinion)

I'm concerned why everyone just seems to accept this and not figuratively slap Microsoft for being so seemingly neglectful of their products. It's more than just PAD or Power Automate in general! It's Office, Windows, and other products! Just look at how many updates have catastrophic consequences like deleting files! This is incredibly unprofessional and needs to be addressed by someone.

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Power Automate Desktop

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Henrik_M 2,021 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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SET Empty_DataTable TO {[] } (paste into PAD) creates an empty datatable. Not sure what you would use it for though 🙂

I agree.

I think I disagree, but I'm not sure what you mean.

I agree with your other points.

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UK_Mike on at

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Totally agree, but just with Windows, im adamant there is still Windows 95 etc code in current iteration 😂
I can assure you UiPath has the same issues, these rpa's are constantly evolving.
The core feature of PAD is to " try " and make it accessible to non coders.
Using Excel as an example, ordinary people find new ways of doing calcs that even the developers thought not possible, so post them on message boards etc for all of us to work smarter.
In these forums I have witnessed ordinary people figuring out a better way than the developers thought possible, just by trying things differently...
Maybe someone on here knows exactly how to simplify your issue ?

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ExpeditorsSigma 2 on at

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For 1, I have admittedly discovered that way to create an empty data table. However, this isn't recognized as a datatable type as soon as any operation is performed on it.

For 3, I may just be new to enclosing variables rather than using a $ in powershell (or simply stating the name in other high-level languages). It just seems odd.

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