After updating Excel to version 2108, hotkeys are performed too fast to be recognized

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Greetings, unique issue here

After updating to Office 365 Version 2108 (August Release), I am experiencing issues with hotkeys in Excel. Before the upgrade, hotkeys could be performed at the default speed as they should. After upgrading, when trying to hotkey opening the file explorer and saving in Excel (alt + fao), the first two keys (f, a) are executed, however, the final key (o), which opens the file explorer, is inputted too fast and doesn’t generate.

To be clear, this is an Excel issue rather than UiPath Studio. The default speed is too fast for Excel to generate the final step (“o”). You can recreate this manually by doing hotkey (alt + fao) at a quick pace, which is still slower than the default activity speed.

Has anyone else dealt with this issue? It can cause significant problems if you’re on this version of Excel and have any hotkey that opens the file explorer.

1 Like
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Hey @tom_mccaffrey

Kindly, which activity are you using to perform this ?

Thanks
#nK

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Hello @Nithinkrishna

I use the Send Hotkey Activity to perform hotkeys in automations, to resolve my issue I had to change the DelayBetweenKeys properties to 500ms so Excel could recognize the hotkey.

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Hi @tom_mccaffrey
Welcome to the UiPath Community!

I have two solutions to your problem and hopefully, you will like the second one better.

  1. First, to address your hotkeys concern with the shortcut alt + fao, I assume you are doing this to imitate human action of holding down Alt key and pressing f, a, o in quick succession.
    F → to bring up File menu
    A → selects Save as…
    O → selects Browse to bring up “Save As…” window.
    To fix the delay issue with your new version:
    ==> You can try to increase the value of DelayBetweenKeys option in Send Hotkey activity.
    ==> You may also want to do this using 3 Send Hotkey activities, respectively calling alt + f, alt + a, alt + o. Choose how much delay you want after each activity using DelayBefore property in Send Hotkey activity.
  2. You can avoid all this and press F12 which brings up the same Save As... dialog. :slight_smile:

I hope this helps.
Cheers!

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Thanks @RPAForEveryone

Currently in the process of updating our automations with a 500ms delay time between keys. I wanted to bring awareness to this issue so others would have solutions as well, so thanks for the great response!

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Pressing F12 should save you and your bot quite some time and it’s effective too!

If it helped solve your concern, please consider marking the post as solution so the thread will close automatically.

Happy automation!

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Cool @tom_mccaffrey :slight_smile:

Thanks for sharing.
#nK

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Thanks for Sharing !!