Unanswered

Copy and paste a value into an entry field - can you even do this?

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

I am getting started trying to learn PAD, what it will and will not do, etc.

I would like to be able to select a word or number in a doc like Word or Excel and have PAD automatically paste the number/word into an entry field in another window. This other application is Agile PLM which is an Oracle product lifecycle management tool.

Can I even do this with PAD? Here is the idea: hold down a key or cntrl key combination while clicking on the value in Word doc. The selection automatically populates the field in Agile PLM and does a CR or Enter. Possible? Ideas to start with?

Thanks

Marty

Categories:

Power Automate Desktop

I have the same question (0)

All responses (4)

Answers (0)

Sort by

MichaelAnnis 5,727 Moderator on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!
Not knowing the specifics of your case, here is the closest I can get to what you described, and it will work for both Excel and Word as it just uses what you have copied (to the clipboard) to populate your fields in Agile:

For each field in Agile, create 3 commands:
"Focus Window (Agile)"
"Get text from clipboard"
"Populate text field (in Agile)".
Do this in the order that you pull the information from Word/Excel.
Put a STOP on each "Focus Window" command

Now the PAD is set up, and you are ready to start the process of getting this data into agile. Run the bot. When it stop, you should have your Word/Excel open and your Agile open, ready for entries and PAUSED at the first "Focus Window"

So, then you select your text, right click copy, and on your keyboard, use the commands to RESUME the PAD. The default for PAD is CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + T, but you can change this in the Settings of the home PAD. PAD will focus the Agile Window, get the clipboard text, and write the clipboard text to the Agile Text field.

That's the general way of what you said. For Excel, if the numbers you need are always in the same spot, it's really easy to skip the manual process and use "Read from Excel" for the number you need to go into Agile. Word would be much harder.

Hope this helps!

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Michael - This looks like a great idea to start. I will try it.
Thanks
Marty

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Almost there. I have it working one time. Thanks for the tips! I select the text in the document, copy to clipboard, run the bot and it pastes it in the right window and hits the CR then I get my result.
So now I would like to have this rerun or something so I can do it over and over.
Select the text, copy to clipboard
Run bot
Select text and copy to clipboard
Run bot again ...
Can I go to the beginning when done, or wait etc.? How can I get the bot to be continuously active until I stop it? or have two flows that call each other?
Thanks again.
M

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
MichaelAnnis 5,727 Moderator on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

You can put it in a loop; however, I thought you were filling out a form. So the UI elements would be different for each form field, unless your just using "Send Keys" to {Tab} through it.

Anyways, Loop is easy, just drag your Loop command over and make sure all your commands you want to loop end up in between Loop and End.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No