Power Automate Desktop: PDF Extraction and Application Entry

In this Power Automate Desktop tutorial, you'll learn how to automate the time-consuming process of extracting data from PDFs and entering it into an application. With step-by-step guidance, you'll discover how to use Regular Expressions, and Excel in your advanced Power Automate Desktop flows.

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00:00:00 Intro

00:03:52 Initialization
In Power Automate Desktop, regions are used to group actions to organize and structure your workflow. In addition, they are a way to separate and distinguish different parts of your workflow visually. In the initialization, region variables are created, and applications are opened.

00:05:09 Extract PDF Invoices
Use the Extract text from PDF action to read the PDF data into text. We use Regular Expressions (RegEx) to extract data from the PDF. RegEx is a series of characters that defines a search pattern. With the Parse text action, we do the RegEx extraction in Power Automate Deskop.

00:14:15 Dynamic RegEx
Instead of having one Parse text action for each RegEx extraction, we create a dynamic solution. First, use a DataTable to store the Name, the RegEx patterns, and the Match. Then Power Automate Desktop loops the DataTable.

00:20:26 Install Contoso Invoicing App
The Contoso Invoicing App is a sample application from Microsoft.

00:23:00 UI Automation
With a Run Application action, we open an application with Power Automate Desktop. We can click any element in an application with a Click UI element in window action. The Populate text field in window action lets us type into applications. The Set drop-down list value in window action allows us to automate combo boxes.

00:31:15 Dynamic Selector
In Power Automate Desktop, a dynamic selector refers to a selector that is generated dynamically during the execution of a workflow.

00:38:49 Extract Application Data
The Extract data from window action extracts data from applications. We can save it to either an Excel sheet or a variable.

00:41:59 Reconciliation to Excel
We want to store all data in an Excel sheet. The Launch Excel action opens an Excel instance. Remember to specify which sheet to work in with a Set active Excel worksheet action. Finally, we append the data to our Excel sheet.

00:52:29 DateTime Manipulation
We can convert any date to the DateTime format we prefer.

00:56:44 Extract Multiple PDFs
With a Get files in folder action, we grab the PDF files into a list of file names. With a For each action, we iterate through them.

01:02:23 Save PDFs from Outlook
Launch an Outlook instance and save the attachments to a folder with the Retrieve email messages from Outlook action. Then, with a Close Outlook action we close the instance again.

01:07:08 Move Processed PDFs
When our flow has processed a PDF, we move the PDF to a folder with processed PDFs.

01:09:07 Move Processed Emails
When our flow processes an Outlook email with an attachment, it will move it to another Outlook folder.

01:10:47 Dynamic File Naming

#powerautomate #powerplatform #microsoft365

[andersjensenorg]

Thanks for all the likes and support 🙌🔥

Instagram behind the scenes: @andersjensenorg

[himike]

Great Video! Even when this video was done 1 year ago. it still benefited me a lot. How I wish that I got to know your channel much earlier.

[dineshpokala]

Awesome,
Thanks for making the content like this with real word scenarios and best practices.

[grzegorz]

great job, as always. I learn from you a lot of new things all the time. i have been using PA Desktop for a truly long period of time, but I wasn't aware of 'region'.

[Pedrohd]

@Mr Anders, congratulations on the class, I learn more and more by watching your classes. like

[shaunrowley]

Thanks for another great video again! Thanks for explaining Regions and RegEx hopefully this will help with my OneDrive Project to obtain the tags for images, export, rename and import back to Onedrive, then move to various folders based on the image tag to make a timeline of images and events

[Lalithchary]

Thank you for the turorial. i liked a lot. and it has so much learning. you explaination is very good drilling down into complexicity. you are a good teacher.

[amaryelane]

Thanks, @Anders Amazing & useful content. Make a video on Error & Exception Handling in detail.

[peteharrison]

I'm really impressed with PAD, but mostly with your tutorial. The step by step approach as really shown me how to look at this type of business problem.
However, I did run into a couple of problems:
Converting the datetime process continued to fail unless I changed my Windows region to English US. In the end I added another variable to hold the UK date format separate from the Data Table and used it to update the excel spreadsheet.

Secondly, I continually got errors saving the spreadsheet. There is a documented problem with PAD and I added a .bat file to run in the End Processing with a command 'taskkill excel.exe /F' which forced Excel to end and stopped the error of it telling the spreadsheet was read only.

But this aside, thank you for your great work. Now I'm going to tackle my own problem.

[honeymethil]

Thanks for this valuable share. Please make a video on bulk upload or excel upload (excel to be picked from a folder) in a web application using power automate desktop.

[MeerAutomationHub]

very nicely explained.... thanks a lot

That was a great video, thank you so much. Any other material were dealing with multiples instances for the match expression. Let say, you have an unknown number of invoices in a single PDF, therefore you need to iterate through different match for the each Regexp for "Date"; "Account Name" and "Email"?

[chulitoalbo]

Grate Video! How do you create a Developer Enviroment? Or do you need to create the RPA -FLow with that Computer where the works has to be done? Thank you :)

[Lamouettekamikaze]

What is the point of the Contoso app part again ? Thank you for your awesome content ❤

[jamescline]

Very good video instruction. Wondering why date is populating Contoso with May 23, 2023 and not 5/23/2023?

[fbouxuy]

Hi Anders
Great video but can you write the regex in the comments, it´s hard to see in the video?

[wsihevq]

@andersjensenorg can u create a video in which we do not have to buy a premium, Im a student from college and my project got stuck halfway when u started using table from preimum feature, can you please help how we can move ahead with the free version?

[chethan]

Hi Andres,
I have different types of invoice format in PDF, for which i want to extract the basic details like invoice number, date, base amount, total amount and discerption. how to get this done in power automate?

[afifahsabirah]

what about line items? how do we extract the line items and loop it?

[peteharrison]

Just found a module 'Recognise entries in Text' which found dates in strings like "01 March 2023" and "Feb 02, 2021" and converted them into '01/03/2023 00:00:00' and '02/02/2021 00:00:00' respectfully.