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PA Desktop: Target Outlook.com subject and body fields for populate text field action.

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Posted on by ncd

Hi there.

Using the action recorder to target and fill the To: and Cc: input fields in https://outlook.office.com/mail/ works fine, but when trying to target the Subject or Body input fields the element ids keep chaging (on page refresh? on new email?) and Power Automate Desktop identifies them as different UI elements (e.g.: 'Add a Subject'1, 'Add a Subject'2, 'Add a Subject'3...), which makes it impossible to consistently target them with the "Populate text field on web page" action as the fields don´t have consistent ids for different flow runs.

Any idea of how to consistently target the subject and body fields?

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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Can't you just use a Send email action instead of using the web UI?

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ncd 10 on at

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@Agnius
Thank you for your reply.

I have two problems with the Send email action:
It is not working for me (always times out) and it seems it might be because PA Desktop is flagged as some sort of "unsafe program" when it comes to sending email and it would need some security setup that I'm not too comfortable enabling in my company's computers.

Most importantly, I need to review and add extra custom content (text, Excel tables...) to the email body before sending it, so it's very convenient to have the text just added to the body input box so that I can modify it there. I could also do it with the Outlook app, but having to open new programs really slows down the flow. I would actually prefer it if there were a "review email" for the send email action as I could just use PA Cloud instead of PA Desktop, but I haven't figured out a way to do that review&modify step in PA cloud yet.
Cheers.

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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If you're doing this for work, why not use the Outlook app on your machine then? Even though it's obviously not fun to automate its UI either, it is easier to do than automating the web UI of Outlook.com.

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ncd 10 on at

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I'll resort to that if it keeps failing, though the Outlook app offers its own problems (cannot attach to a running instance?).

For now I have got it working clicking on the outer div of the subject box instead of on the textbox itself, and for the body clicking on the outer "type / to insert files and more" div (not the spans). Let see if it lasts.

Thank you for your input!

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