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Excel - Failed to Activate Cell After Using Send Keys

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Posted on by devothunder

I'm having a very difficult time with my excel automations in PAD 2.38.182.23307.

After using the 'Send Keys' action, PAD is failing on subsequent steps to activate cells. I've tried putting in 'Focus window' right before it, set active Excel worksheet, etc but nothing is working. I setup a simple PAD flow as follows:

Terminate process - Excel

Launch excel

Activate cell in excel worksheet

focus window

Set active cell

send keys

focus window

Activate cell in excel worksheet (failed)

Is anyone else running into this? Are there any workarounds? I'm also seeing a lot of failures using focus window on existing excel instances.

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Power Automate Desktop

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Nived_Nambiar 18,138 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @devothunder

Could you share the flow screenshot, also tell me why you are using send keys option?

Thanks & Regards,
Nived N 🚀

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devothunder 23 on at

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I've found that two things prevent the failing:
- Adding a {Return} or {Escape} after sending values to cells
- Increasing the delay to 100ms

Interestingly now after processing an excel in edit mode of the flow, the desktop recorder won't recognize the excel unless I close and reopen it 😣

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