In today’s digital workflows, teams across HR, operations, finance, and support deal with repetitive manual tasks every day. One of the most common inefficiencies is manually entering data into third-party web forms, especially when those portals do not provide APIs for direct integration. This repetitive work not only slows down productivity but also leads to inconsistent data entry and a higher risk of manual errors.
Power Automate Desktop (PAD), Microsoft’s powerful automation tool, helps users streamline routine desktop processes. By integrating custom JavaScript into PAD flows, users can interact directly with web pages, filling forms, performing validations, and handling scenarios where traditional UI automation or selectors may fail. This approach allows precise and efficient manipulation of HTML elements, making it ideal for automating third-party web forms.
In this blog, we’ll walk through how to configure Power Automate Desktop to read data from Excel and automatically populate a web form, eliminating manual data entry and accelerating workflows.
When is This Automation Useful?
Let’s consider a potential use case:
The HR team receives details of new candidates in an Excel file, including information such as name, contact details, skills, and experience. Currently, HR personnel need to manually enter each candidate’s data into the recruitment portal to initiate the further hiring process. Our goal is to automate this task using Power Automate Desktop (PAD) combined with JavaScript, so that the data from Excel can be directly populated into the web form on the HR portal. This automation eliminates repetitive manual entry, reduces errors, and ensures that candidate information is consistently updated in the system in a fraction of the time.
We will walk through the steps below to achieve the above requirement.
Prerequisites:
Before we get started, we need to have the following things ready:
- Power Automate Desktop is installed on the system.
- An Excel file containing the candidate entries we need to populate on the web form.
- Access to the web form that we plan to automate...Read More>>
