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Read from Excel value doesn't exist

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Posted on by lkhall_37203

Working on a Power Automated Desktop flow depending on the name read from a web page element I am looking up the name in Excel to determine what flow block it should go to. There are several hundred names but only a handful have specific requirements thus having different flow blocks and, in my Excel, I only included the names with unique flows. Problem that I have is for all the names that don't exist in Excel, PAD throws and error when it can't look up the value. I haven't been able to find a way to do the look up and if the value is found set a variable to the value in the mapped excel file else default to some other value.

I know I can do this with multiple if / else conditions but to me it seemed easier to do a lookup to set the flow block. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

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Power Automate Desktop

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Srini007 3,490 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @lkhall_37203

I don't know how your flow is throwing an error if not found in the excel, but can you share screenshot of your workflow?

Suggestion here is that you can use For Each once you use the Read Excel action, so you can loop and check if the excel value is equal to web element text. If you found then place a variable and set the value the break action inside the for each loop

Now, Outside the for each loop you can put a condition that If the variable you placed is not a null then you can place switch action to run different blocks

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Srini
lkhall_37203 72 on at

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Guess I should have been clearer, what I am doing is first running a find and replace action to find the row / column index in Excel of the variable. Then doing a read from Excel where I pass in the row index from the previous step to find the correct row value for my flow variable. The find / replace action fails if it doesn't find the value that I am trying to look up. I wanted to know if there is any way using the find / replace action if it doesn't find anything to default to a value. Now that I think about it, I think I can configure the on-error property in the find / replace and set the variable value there and let the flow continue. Unless anyone thinks there is a better way to handle this.
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Srini007 3,490 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @lkhall_37203

I got your issue now, Yes, I believe the OnError setup is the best way to handle this issue, As it has to continue on error and set the value with some default values

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Thanks,

Srini