2020.10.2

Release date: 28 October 2020

New Features and Improvements

PowerPoint Automation

You can now create and edit PowerPoint presentations using Presentations activities.

Mail Automation

Automate Gmail and Outlook 365

StudioX has expanded its mail automation capabilities with the addition of Gmail and Outlook 365 support. All you need to do is define the account to use by adding a Use Outlook 365 or Use Gmail activity, and then add activities to automate inside it. All existing activities that previously worked with the desktop version of Outlook have been updated to also support Gmail and Outlook 365. For this release, Gmail and Outlook 365 require that you use your organization's application IDs.

Improvements

• A new filtering option is available for the For Each Email activity that enables you to only iterate through emails with attachments.
• The Date (as text) email field can now be selected from the Plus menu of input fields for activities added inside Use Desktop Outlook App. You can use the date of the email selected in Outlook or that of the current email when iterating through Outlook emails.

Excel Automation

Global Excel Resources

You can now add an Excel file to your project as a global resource by connecting the project to the file. When a project is connected to an Excel file, all activities in the project can access and modify the file. You can still add Excel files to automations with the Use Excel File activity, in which case only activities added inside the container can modify the files.

New Activities

• Change Pivot Data Source - Changes the range of the source data for a pivot table.
• Save Excel File As - Saves a workbook added to the project or the Project Notebook as a different file. You can specify the file name and the file format to save as.
• Clear Sheet/Range/Table - Clears the data from a specified sheet, range, or table.
• Read Cell Value - Copies the value from a spreadsheet cell.
• Read Cell Formula - Copies the formula from a spreadsheet cell.
• For Each Excel Sheet - Executes one or more activities for each sheet in an Excel workbook.
• Find First/Last Data Row - Finds the row number for the row where data starts and for the last row containing data in a specified sheet, range, or table.
• Write Range - Writes a data table that was saved for later, or values from an Excel table or range into another range.

Improvements

• We have made a few updates to improve the experience of working with the Project Notebook:

  • It is now referred to simply as Notebook in the Studio interface.
  • The Notebook entry in the Plus menu and the Data Manager now displays whether or not it is configured so that changes to the file are saved at the end of the automation: Notebook (Save changes: on) or Notebook (Save changes: off).
• You can now directly interact with a sheet added by the Insert Sheet activity. The Reference new sheet as optional field available for Insert Sheet enables you to save a reference to the sheet for later use in the automation.
• The Text to Columns activity now supports Line Break as a delimiter.
• When you select an Excel sheet using the Custom Input option, you no longer need to enter the sheet name manually. The Worksheet name field is now a combo box that enables you to select the sheet you want to use. This works when the Excel file defined for the Use Excel File activity is a static file, or when the file is dynamic and a template was defined.
• If you select the Indicate in Excel option from the Plus and the Excel Add-in is not installed or it cannot be accessed, you no longer have to manually navigate to Home > Tools to install or repair the add-in. Simply click the Yes button in the error dialog box that appears.
• You can now configure the Delete column activity to delete multiple columns.

UI Automation

New Activities

• Take Screenshot – Takes a screenshot of a specified UI element or application and saves it as an image file.
• Handle basic window manipulation tasks with the new Maximize, Minimize, Move, and Restore Window activities.
• The new SAP activities category brings a number of activities created specifically for SAP automation.

Add Variables to Selectors

You can now create variables in container activities and add them to selectors in targets of UI automation activities.

File Automation

New Activities

• Compress/Zip Files - Adds files or folders to a compressed (zip) file.
• Extract/Unzip Files - Extracts all the contents of a zip file archive to a specified folder.

Improvements

• The Extension property can now be used when selecting the output of the Get File Info activity as well as for the current file in the iteration when working inside a For Each File in Folder activity.

Word Automation

New Activities

• Save Word File As - Saves a Word file added to the project as a different file. You can specify the file name and the Word file type to save as.

Common Activities

New Activities

• Get Asset - Gets a specified Orchestrator asset by using a provided AssetName.
• Group - Groups logically related activities and executes them in the order in which they are added.
• Input Dialog - Displays a dialog box that prompts the user with a message and an input field.
• Modify Text - Updates a text value using modifications including find and replace, trim, and combining (concatenating) with another text value.
• Save for Later - Saves a value for later use in the automation. The saved value can be used as input in another activity.
• Text to Left/Right - Retrieves the text to the left and right of the first occurrence of the indicated subtext.

Create and Share Templates

You can now create and publish your own templates in the same way as you do processes. Sharing templates with others is as simple as publishing them to Orchestrator. You can access your templates and those shared by others from the new Templates tab in Studio.

Numeric Calculations

You can now do numeric calculations directly in StudioX without the need for Excel. On any input field that accepts a number, select the Number option in the Plus menu, and then add mathematical formulas in the Numeric Calculation window. You can add formulas and use any method from the Visual Basic Math class (for example Math.Round(1.06,1)).

Clipboard Integration

You can now save the output of activities to the clipboard and paste that data in input fields later in the automation:

• The Copy to clipboard option is available in the Plus menu for fields that output text, number, DataTable, and Boolean values. Number and Boolean values are copied to the clipboard as text.
• The Paste from clipboard option is available in the Plus menu for input fields that accept text and DataTable values.

Repair Tool for Microsoft Office Interop

A new tool is available to help you fix Microsoft Office issues that cause errors when automating Excel, Outlook, Word, or PowerPoint. This tool generates a repair plan that can be either run by users with admin rights on their machines, or deployed by administrators in an organization to the machines of users who don’t have admin rights.

Other Improvements

• To make activities easier to identify in your projects, each activity now has a unique identification number that reflects its position in the project workflow. The ID is visible in the upper-left corner of each activity. The first activity has the ID 1, the second 2, and so on. For activities added inside other activities, the ID consists of the parent ID followed by a decimal point and number. For example, if the first activity in the project (ID=1) contains two other activities, their IDs are 1.1 and 1.2.

• We have renamed a few activities and common scenarios to clarify their purpose:

  • The common scenario Iterate through email attachments is now named Save and process attachments.
  • The common scenario Iterate through emails is now named Repeat actions for emails.
  • The Data Extraction option in the ribbon is now named Table Extraction.
  • The Mark Email as Read activity is now named Mark Email as Read/Unread.
  • The Copy/Paste Range activity is now named Copy Range.
  • The Download File activity is now named Wait for Download.
  • The Use Outlook Account activity is now named Use Desktop Outlook App.
• A validation error now occurs if you configure a field that accepts a file path or folder path using the Text Builder and the path contains characters that are not allowed in filenames. The invalid characters are newline : * ? " < > |",.

Known Issues

• If the Word document you select to use as the body of an email in a Send Email, Forward Email, or Reply to Email activity contains pictures, some of the pictures may not appear in the body of the email that is sent.

  If a picture fails to appear in the email body, try one of the following workarounds:

  • Open the Word document, remove the picture, and then add the picture again.
  • Change the extension of the Word document to .zip, extract the archive, open the file document.xml located in the folder word, search for the attribute r:link, and remove it (for example, r:link="rId11"). Save the file, then zip the extracted files again and change the extension back to .docx.

Bug Fixes

• An error no longer occurs when you try to use the Indicate in Excel option in the StudioX profile with an Excel file from a OneDrive folder. In addition, please note that if a file from a OneDrive folder is open in Excel, the data in it cannot be accessed directly from the Plus menu. To access named cells, named ranges, tables, and sheets from the menu, you must first close the file.
• If you execute a project with Outlook desktop activities when Microsoft Outlook and Studio are not running with the same privileges, the error message that is displayed now informs you that you must run the applications with the same privileges (either both as administrator or both not as administrator).
• The correct range is now displayed as the Current Selection in the UiPath tab of the Excel ribbon when you select Indicate in Excel again after having already used this option to select data directly from the file for the same activity field.
• Outlook folder names with Japanese characters are now displayed correctly in the Move to field of the Move Email activity. Characters in this field are no longer encoded, apart from \ and %. If you enter folder names in the Text Builder and the names contain the characters \ or %, the characters must be URL-encoded (%5C and %25 respectively).