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PAD Selector Sometimes has ".xlsx" sometimes not

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Posted on by bpearce

Help! I have a PAD flow that has been running well for a few months. Lately it has been failing about 50% of the time on a step that is selecting "Home" in the Excel Ribbon with the error "Tab selection failed". On a hunch I re-added the UI element and compared the two selectors in the builder.

Here is the previous selector:

:desktop > window[Name="Toast_TimeEntry_MonthlySummary - Excel"][Process="EXCEL"]

Here is the latest selector capture on failure:

:desktop > window[Name="Toast_TimeEntry_MonthlySummary.xlsx - Excel"][Process="EXCEL"]

The difference is the ".xlsx" part. Why would the selector sometimes have ".xlsx" and other times not?

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Power Automate Desktop

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Hi @bpearce

It is going to be hard to say why PAD is doing that.
But you could use only the word Excel with a wild card prefix so that anything prior to Excel can be accepted.

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Oh yes and 1 more thing 🙂
Check if the system settings are sometimes enabled to show the file extensions and sometimes disabled and therefore the selectors are behaving that way.

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bpearce 26 on at

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@VJR - thanks for the suggestions. I do recall enabling file extensions in File Explorer some days back. Never thought a change in File Explorer would impact PAD driving Excel. I am humbled once again.

For others that come across this I'll add that I didn't figure out "wild card prefix" as VJR suggested, but I was able to use the selector editor to specify "starts with" instead of "equals" and truncating the Name= at the word "Summary" (example above).

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Here is the official link to the documentation for building custom selectors.
Also accepts variables and regular expressions.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flows/build-custom-selectors

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