PAD Selector Sometimes has ".xlsx" sometimes not

[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?

[VJR · Accepted solution]

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.

[VJR]

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.

[bpearce]

@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).

[VJR]

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