Web Scraping in Power Automate for Desktop (Full Tutorial)

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This full tutorial shows how to do web scraping in Microsoft Power Automate for Desktop. Learn how to extract data from any web page and save it to Excel.

You're guided through the basic scraping features, and you learn the excellent advanced features, such as Regex, manipulating the scraping data, and dynamic naming.

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0:00 Intro
It's straightforward to scrape web data in Power Automate for Desktop. Use a Launch new browser instance and then an Extract data from web page action to save the data from the web site into either a variable or an Excel sheet. In the hands-on use case, we read an Excel sheet, do online searches, scrape the result and then write it back into Excel sheets.

7:16 Initialization
Create an Excel instance for the scraped results with a Launch Excel action. Then create another Excel instance for our input data. The input data defines what data we want to scrape. Here it's Amazon search terms. We read the search terms into a DataTable to make it easy to work with. Use a Set active Excel worksheet to strengthen the robustness of the robot.

18:45 Web Scraping
To scrape the correct data, we create a robust flow that takes us to the right page. Use a Launch Chrome action and fill in the URL. Use a For each action to iterate through the DataTable. Use a Set drop-down list value on web page to pick Books in the drop down. The Populate text field on the web page lets you search for something. The click link on the webpage enables you to click elements on a webpage. A best practice is to navigate to the start page before each scraping. This ensures that the actions are performed the same in all scrapings. The add new worksheet adds a new Excel worksheet for each scraping. Now we're ready to do the web scraping in Power Automate for Desktop. Use an Extract data from web page action and open the website to the scraping wizard. Mark your structured data with the Live web helper. The Write to Excel worksheet action writes the results back to Excel. In the end, we'll have a Close Excel action to close Excel and save the scraped results.

32:58 Add Excel Headers
You can add the headers to the scraped results in the Live web helper, but with a Set variable and a Write to Excel worksheet it's fully customizable.

37:34 Scrape Multiple Pages
Create a UI element for the Next button. After each data scraping, we click the Next button with Power Automate and then do another scraping. The Loop is the action you want to use.

41:53 Dynamic File Naming
We don't want our results to get overwritten each time the robot runs. The trick is to get the current date and time, convert it to a text and use it in the file naming.

45:40 Regex
You can use RegEx directly in the live scraping helper to manipulate your data. RegEx is a series of characters that defines a search pattern. We use the search pattern to define what data we want out of the extracted data.

#microsoft #powerautomate #office365
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Thanks for all your likes and support 🙌😍

andersjensenorg
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Great tutorial Anders, I specifically like that you clearly label all your Elements and Variables. Thank you for the time and effort that you put into your videos.

MrWestern
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Deine ausführliche Beschreibung der einzelnen Schritte ist genau das richtige. Es ist ein unglaublicher Schub an Informationen, die in einem perfekten Kontext sehr gut aufgearbeitet sind und die beste Basis bieten für das nächste Level.

Djoma
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I must say its a wonderful playlist across youtube on Power Automate desktop. the style is so elegent and simple that a non-coder can understand this complex topic in a layman language. many 2 thanks for your efforts Anders Jensen

aslamwaris
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man, great content, please do more videos about more advanced stuff. Power Automate is a great tool and you are an amazing example that not every single hero needs to wear a cape! Thank you

grzegorz
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Thank you so much for your tutorials! I’ve never used power automate before but your videos are so clear and precise that I am confident I can learn. Implementing this is going to make a huge difference. Thank you!

faithritter
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This is so helpful to my personal project, I can't thank you enough!! I did have to change some things but your video helped me understand the basics to modify as needed. :) So excited to run my automation!😁

ameliajaspersen
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Amazing, this should be how we work. You've helped me save a lot of my time doing repetitive boring tasks. Now I'm an irreplacable employee of my team

LeThanh-ejwp
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Such a great explanation. You have the heart of a teacher. I would love to meet you and thank you personally for all the knowledge I gained with your content. Thank so much Anders.

Otonieljn
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Please like this video, if you want more advanced RPA content - thanks for all your support 🙌🔥
Instagram: @andersjensenorg

andersjensenorg
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This is something special I found on YouTube to learn Wen scrapping using Power Automate for Desktop. <3

mohsin_ali
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Mr.Jensen, this is the best intro of PAD with best example. TYVM

nareshJman
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He is one of the best instructors on youtube. Wish he would do more projects with power automate desktop. Simply amazing content. I hope he makes udemy course.

sergiopeixoto
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Thank you Anders for all your effort in putting this together. This tutorial was extremely helpful and to the point. Thanks a million :)

maheshwarhaldar
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Hi, Anders ! A real master class, with RegEx bonus. Thank you for sharing !!! Won my like.

oricchannel
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I've have always wanted to learn easily the web-scraping, with this video you really help me

firstsebastian
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Wow, wasnt looking for. Popped up in YouTube then watched nearly all in lunch and now late back... very good video.. so now I had better try it

ZeNex
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Wow, what an awesome tutorial. Definitely worth subscribing to your channel (and liking the video of course). I played around with web scraping with various tools but this one is really a superb tutorial as there are no black boxes. You explain everything very clearly.

I guess the one thing that no web scraper will overcome - especially when scraping BigTech websites like Amazon, LinkedIn, Ebay etc - is that the sites and their underlying structure change all the time. So it's not a one off automation that will run forever. It definitely needs to be maintained.

But if you learn from a grandmaster like in this video, you know what you're doing which makes understanding your automations of course way easier.

philippkowalski
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This is such a good video tutorial for Desktop Power Automate. Brilliantly explained with a great use-case. Thank you so much 🙏

roddersu
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Amazing tutorial. Very easy to learn and I will surely try this out. It will be easy to extract meaningful data from the web to excel sheet. Thank you!

kopilkaiser