Is it possible to access data table columns by name in PAD?

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Hi,

I'm trying to access the columns of a data table by name.

The official documentation says the following:

If you want to access a specific column in a datable that contains column headers, use the %ExcelData[rowNumber]['ColumnName']% notation.

This is obviously nonsense, since if we filter by column AND row, we end up with a cell, not a column.

I tried a bunch of stuff like using [:] for row numbers or even [0:{number of rows here}] but it seems as soon as you select more than one row, PAD hits you with the following error:

Variable 'DataTable[:]' doesn't have a property 'ColumnName'.

I mean I know I can build a workaround by searching for the index of the column name in DataTable.Columns and then accessing the column via that index, but this just seems unnecessarily complicated. Am I missing something?

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Power Automate Desktop

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MichaelAnnis 5,727 Moderator on at

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There is an action. I believe it is “get column as list” or something like that. This extracts an entire column from a datatable into a list. And you should be able to use the same syntax without a row.

good luck!

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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The action you need is called Retrieve data table column into list. You can use a column name in it to retrieve the entire column into a list variable.
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