Web scrape Flight Information (Power Automate Desktop+Excel)

In this video, I demonstrate a flow to scrape flight information(departure, arrival time and costs) from the web after feeding the required information and to see how costs vary with the time between booking and departure.
the final bit is bringing the information into Excel and doing some cleanup with PowerQuery
PART 1
00:00 Introduction
00:41 What you would learn from the video
01:30 Walkthrough of the site that would be scraped
02:26 Starting off the Power Automate Desktop
This is where we begin to build the flow, step by step - Launching the webpage, clicking the buttons to close pop ups so we are ready to fill in the required information
05:43 Populate From and To Locations on the site, populate the number of adults
07;20 Populate departure date
08:13 first test of the flow
An important step when building any flow is to ensure that the robot works, you don't want to wait till the end before discovering errors that could have been discovered earlier
09:13 Clicking the "Flight Search" button
the concept here will enable you to click any button or link on a webpage
10:04 Extracting data from the webpage
14:30 Concluding thoughts for part 1
PART 2 - Looping the flow through a series of dates
15:41 Overview of the 2nd part of the project
16:46 Launch Excel to open the workbook
17:36 Determing the first free row of data and read all dates
19:53 Testing the flow
20:52 Using a For each to loop through all dates
22:56 Explaining the logic to retrieve data into Excel
26:45 Testing the flow
28:25 Reviewing the results in Excel
29:10 Usinf PowerQuery to clean up the data
30:20 Loading the data into Excel
30:45 Reviewing the data and final thoughts

[@ExcelMoments]

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[@mosessawa6816]

This walk-through came in very handy to meet a pressing need. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

[@ExcelMoments]

That's really good to know. Thanks for the feedback

[@DataVisualisation]

As always, a very good explanation and visualisation of the individual steps.

[@ExcelMoments]

Thank you very much for the feedback. You are welcome

[@iamnitinnawar]

Wonderfully Explained !!! Thanks !!!

[@ExcelMoments]

You are welcome

[@davidakomolafe3609]

Thank you for the insightful video
You always make it look easy

[@ExcelMoments]

Because it is easy😁

[@IvanCortinas_ES]

I've worked with Power Automate Desktop, but I didn't know about these options with web pages.
I thank you for having shed a lot of light on my particular case.
In general terms I have understood the procedure. It is very well explained with the use of variables.
However, what would happen if you created a step to close a popup button on a home page, and later this popup disappeared, because it was a notice that the company removed? Would it return an error or would the flow continue running?
Thank you Victor. It is a very interesting video.

[@ExcelMoments]

Very good question Ivan and something I had intended to talk about "Error handling", because i honestly suspect that the pop-up would be taken off at some point
To the question, on that particular step, the default would be to "throw up an error and halt", but you can edit that step - The "on error" button gives you the option to continue to run the flow, by going to the next step or a label. that would be the option to go with to stop it from throwing up an exception

[@IvanCortinas_ES]

@@ExcelMoments So similar to On Error Resume Next in VBA

[@ExcelMoments]

@@IvanCortinas_ES sbsooutely, that's what it is 😀 or on error GoTo 10

[@ankursharma6157]

Hi Victor,
Thank You for Sharing Your Knowledge!
I followed Your tutorial step-by-step and created the Flow.
But, due to the following error, I was not able to successfully run it.
Please assist.
Q) The dates are read along with 00:00:00.
Example: 29-12-2023 00:00:00.
Hence, in the airline website the date is input along with 00:00:00 . . and consequently, runs into an error.
In the Excel Workbook, I cleared the formatting.
I checked the formatting . . it shows in dd/mm/yyyy format.
Please assist.
Thank You!

[@ExcelMoments]

So here is what i did in the Excel, i formatted the dates as TEXT. So you can put the actual dates in column A and in column B ,you do a formatting like =TEXT(A3, "dd/mm/yyyy"), that way the column B which gets populated is a TEXTSTRING. Let me know how it goes

[@ankursharma6157]

Yes . . it worked. THANK YOU!
1st, in the TEXT formula, I applied the formatting using dash - "dd-mm-yyyy".
It ran into an error.
Next, I applied the formatting using the forward slash - "dd/mm/yyyy".
It ran successfully.
It was an experience to fold hands and witness it all happen 😀
Thank You!