General

• You can open Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files added to your automation directly from the Data Manager panel. Right-click any Excel or Word resource and select Open. You can also select Open file location to open the folder containing the file.

• If you're not sure which activity can help you automate a specific action, search through activities using either the search bar at the top of the Activities panel, or the one displayed at the top of the screen after you click Add activity in the Designer panel. Searching returns results from activity names as well as descriptions, so it can be a good way to find activities you may not have discovered yet.

• When you need help with an activity you added to your project, right-click it and then select Help, or select the activity and then press F1 on your keyboard to open its documentation page with information about how to configure it.
• If you want to save a few clicks when designing your automations, you can double-click most activity fields to open the option in the Plus menu most commonly used to configure that field. For example, double-clicking a field that accepts text input opens the Text Builder, doing the same for the Condition field in the If activity opens the Condition Builder.
• When you select Text from the Plus menu to add text to an activity field, you can compose text that combines multiple types of data using the Text Builder. In addition to typing text, you can select other types of data from the Plus menu in the upper-right corner the Text Builder. For example, you can add the contents of a cell in an Excel file, a field in an Outlook email, or one of the properties of a file on your computer that you saved for later in a previous activity.

UI Automation

• When configuring a Use Application/Browser activity to add a desktop application to the automation, if you want the automation to open a specific file, indicate the application, and then add the path to the file in the Application arguments field. For example, if you indicated Acrobat Reader as the application to automate and you want to work with the file form_template.pdf located in the C:\Work folder, enter C:\Work\form_template.pdf in the Application arguments field to open the file in Acrobat when the automation is executed.

• When indicating target elements of App/Web activities in web browsers, always add at least one anchor to make sure the element is correctly identified by the Robot. For more information about targets and anchors, see UI Automation.
• When configuring a Use Application/Browser activity to automate tasks you perform in a web browser, before you indicate the web browser, navigate to the web page where the automation performs the first action. Doing this automatically adds the URL of the page to the Browser URL field, so that you don't have to enter it manually.
• If you don't want to add too many Type Into activities to fill out a form with many fields, you can simplify your workflow by configuring one Type Into activity to enter text in multiple fields. After indicating the first field on the form and selecting the text to type into it, you can open the Text Builder of the Type this field, add the tab special key from the Plus menu inside the Text Builder, and then select the text for the following field. For example, provided that the tab key moves the cursor to the next field in the target application, configuring the Type this field like in the following image copies the text from three different cells and pastes it in three different fields.

• When two consecutive App/Web activities aren't timed correctly (for example, the first takes a long time to execute the action and the second one starts before the previous action is complete), configure the Delay before or Delay after properties from the activities' Properties panel to make sure the first activity completes before the second activity starts. These properties add a delay before or after an activity is executed, increasing the time between activities when needed.
• When the actions you want to perform in a desktop application or web browser depend on the state of the application, use a Check App State activity to determine which actions to perform based on the state. This activity verifies whether an element appears in or disappears from the user interface of the target application and enables you to add different activities to execute when the element is found and/or when it is not found. For example, you can check if you are already logged in to a web application by verifying if the Log in button is present, and only perform the actions required to log in when the button is found.

Excel

• The Excel files you add to automations are not always available at design time (for example, a file can be created by or downloaded during the automation). In this scenario, you can still take advantage of StudioX's deep integration with Excel to configure the activities that use the file by defining another file with the same format (same sheets, columns, tables, etc.) as a template file.
  Once defined, you can indicate data in Excel or select data from the template file directly from the Plus menu.
  For example, if you want to create an automation with a report you'll receive monthly, use an existing report with the same format as the template. To define a template, add the Use Excel File Excel File activity, enter the path to the file to automate, then select the Template file option and indicate the file to use.
• When you want to work with a .xls (Excel 97-2003) workbook, the data in the file cannot be accessed directly from the Plus menu. In this case, you can configure activities that use the file with the Indicate in Excel or Custom input options in the Plus menu. Alternatively, to be able to select data directly from the menu, create a .xlsx copy and add it as a template file.
• When you filter rows in a large sheet and iterate through them using an Excel For Each Row activity, instead of iterating through the original sheet after applying the filter, use a Copy Range activity to copy the filtered rows to a different sheet, and then iterate through the filtered range in the new sheet. This will result in better performance when the project is executed.

Desktop Outlook App

• You can add bodies formatted as HTML for emails sent using mail activities from the desktop Outlook app by selecting the Use Word Document option for the Body field. This enables you to select a Word document containing formatted text, images, or tables as the body of emails sent with the Send Email , Reply to Email, and Forward Email activities.

Running Projects

• If you want to use your computer during project execution without interference from the Robot, you can run your automations in picture-in-picture mode. This features enables you to execute the project in another session opened in a separate window, leaving you in full control of the keyboard, mouse, and screen. To run an automation in picture-in-picture, click the arrow next to Run in the StudioX ribbon, and then select Run in PiP.

• If you dismissed an error that occurred when executing a project before having a chance to read the error message, you can find the error message in the Output panel. To access the Output panel, click Output in the lower-left corner of the StudioX window.

• To avoid opening multiple instances of the same application, before running an automation, close all the applications and files that are used in it.