Power Automate Desktop – Excel worksheet (Sheet1) UI element suddenly not found

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Posted on by MK-29051322-0

Hi Everyone,

I have a Power Automate Desktop flow that was working fine until Monday, and now it suddenly fails without any changes on my side.

The flow fails with element not found when trying to detect an Excel worksheet element.

The selector looks like this:

pane[Class="XLDESK"]
> pane[Class="ExcelGrid"]
> pane[Id="Sheet1"]
> image[Name="Picture 2"]

It already fails at: pane[Id="Sheet1"]

Context

Excel Desktop (Microsoft 365)

Flow uses UI automation

Trying to take a screenshot of a live picture (camera tool) in Excel

Worksheet is already set as active before this step

The Excel file and UI are visible on screen

The flow worked fine until Monday (no changes made)

What I tried

Set active worksheet before the step
Repair / re-capture selector
- Tried different attributes (Id / Name) Still failing at the worksheet level.

Has anyone experienced this recently?
Is the worksheet (Sheet1) selector no longer reliable in PAD, especially when working with live pictures?

(Screenshots of the error attached)

Screenshot 2026-0...

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Power Automate Desktop

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eetuRobo 4,543 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Since it fails at pane[Id="Sheet1"] then it sounds like the selector cant find that sheet. Have you or someone else changed the name of that worksheet to something else than the default Sheet1? Even though you might think that it doesn't refer to the name since the attribute is "Id" it does in fact refer to the name you have given to the worksheet.

Try with the Ordinal = 0. That means it takes the first worksheet regardless of its name or id.

If that doesn't work try capture the element with the new UIA3 Raw -capturing mode instead of the default UIA. It was added in this months patch for 2.68.237.26118 version of PAD

Press "Add UI element"

Three dots select UIA3 Raw and capture the element.

btw your screenshots were not visible at the time of my response.

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MK-29051322-0 2 on at

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@eetuRobo thanks for replying, the ordinal did work now after testing again I see that it fails on Picture

i added the previous attachments again. unfortunately I dont have access to UIRaw yet, may be due to regional releases

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eetuRobo 4,543 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Seems like changing it to Ordinal did work as far as now it found the worksheet (or at least a worksheet). So now it seems like the name attribute on the picture element has changed. Or with the Ordinal being 0 it focused on different sheet which does not have the picture element in it.

For troubleshooting what if you remove the Image element and use Test functionality to then? Like so:

Does it then find the correct worksheet where the picture is? Like so:

if it does then the image element is different than your selector. If it does not find the correct sheet then you might have multiple Excel workbooks / sheets open and you need to not use the ordinal but the name or id to match the correct worksheet.

What if you recapture the element does the Image -element give some other value in the Name attribute than "Picture 2"? Maybe try with "Picture 1" name?

If you have multiple Excels open try closing all other excel files and just leave that one open and see if it finds it then.

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