Weekly Zoom Q&A - free 1-to-1 call for any questions or blockers

[kensoh]

Please note that we will no longer be providing weekly 1-to-1 Q&A calls.

For any questions or blockers feel free to reach out to the community on Telegram.

[kensoh]

Live Q&A # 0 - Wednesday 20 Jan 2021, 4pm SGT (UTC+8)

A spontaneous run of the weekly live Q&A for TagUI RPA users, originally scheduled to start in late Feb. 361 Degree Consultancy is a Singapore-based firm providing software solutions to the accounting sector. Their TagUI users have some questions on a client's automation scenario, so we decided to hop onto a call and get this live Q&A thing started -

[ Updating accounting system with POS transactions ]

• modularising the automation into 2-3 workflows
• exporting spreadsheet from POS vendor website
• getting today's date base on vendor file naming
• different ways to open the spreadsheet to read
• possible pitfalls to avoid with robust RPA design
• why do it via Excel instead of API in their setup

[ Other questions on best RPA / TagUI practices ]

• scheduling and when's the best time to run RPA
• dynamically choosing which image files to use
• using RPA with WhatsApp to send messages
• RPA data privacy and security considerations

[ Sharing Roadmap 2021 - RPA for Everyone ]

• TagUI integrations to MS Excel, Emails, Telegram
• Office RPA, doing RPA in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint
• 24h soft SLA (including weekends) gone live Jan 15
• weekly live Q&A on Zoom + YouTube for TagUI users
• demo of TagUI on cloud (or phone) with Google Colab
• RPA in MS Office, Google Workspace apps, or both?

[kensoh]

Live Q&A # 1 - Friday 29 Jan 2021, 4pm SGT (UTC+8)

In this week's Live Q&A, Ruth and I looked at a couple of user issues raised this morning and had a chat with Hidayat from Singapore, who is looking for an alternative RPA tool for his company.

For issue #921, Joginder from India joined us on the call to troubleshoot a never-seen-before issue - TagUI hangs after Chrome browser is launched. By controlling his laptop through the Zoom meeting, we were able to figure out that the root cause is due to his company's recent network and proxy policy change, which resulted in TagUI not being able to connect to Chrome. He knew immediately who to talk to in his IT department to get this resolved.

For issue #920, Andrew was trying to use mouse_xy() function to return the coordinates of his mouse cursor without success. We made a couple of initial responses and post-call he replied that indeed the issue was that he missed out the step on installing OpenJDK in the setup instructions. OpenJDK is needed for SikuliX to work, which is the engine TagUI uses under the hood for computer vision and OCR, as well as low level keyboard and mouse capabilities.

[kensoh]

Live Q&A # 2 - Thursday 4 Feb 2021, 3pm SGT (UTC+8)

In this week's call, we did some demos and tutorials to answer Hidayat's questions on some work processes that he's planning to automate. Following are the topics we covered -

[ How to get a website's unique element identifiers ]

• TagUI Chrome extension walkthrough with demos
• if no extension allowed, copy XPath from Chrome

[ How to automate report download from website ]

• walkthrough of using visual automation to do that
• for Power Automate, only premium version can

[ Live mode to interactively test out TagUI steps ]

• direct live mode with tagui live command
• live mode with live step within a workflow

[ Complete data extraction example of forex rates ]

• read a column of data from a table on website
• display data meaningfully from multiple columns
• write data into CSV file for next step of process
• report option for overview, auditing and logging
• deploy option to save shortcut to run or schedule
• quiet option to show only intended output or error

[ Other topics ]

• very very very early view of Google Docs RPA POC v1
• video replies to user support issues on TagUI GitHub
• where user downloads & distribution info come from

[kensoh]

Live Q&A # 3 - Wednesday 10 Feb 2021, 5pm SGT (UTC+8)

Satish from Percept Solutions shared with us 2 repetitive and time-consuming workflows in his recruitment process. We ran through the viability of doing that using TagUI and the next steps. The 2 automations could probably be done in 2 days - 1 day to learn how to use TagUI, 1 day to create the automated workflows.

Hidayat asked about storing user ids and passwords, and I shared how that can be done using object repositories (local / global) or datatables. He also asked about automating desktop apps like SAP or SQL query clients. I gave an example of automating the Calculator app, showing various ways to enter inputs and retrieving outputs reliably from the app.

Note - There was some technical issue where Satish was unable to share screen, so we hop onto a Google Meet call for that segment, and his voice is not audible in this video in that segment.

[kensoh]

Live Q&A # 4 - Thursday 18 Feb 2021, 430pm SGT (UTC+8)

In this week's Q&A, Ruth shares on the Microsoft Word Add-in beta that she has created.

We'll post more details soon on where to download this free and open-source tool to do RPA from MS Word.

[kensoh]

A bit late, sorry, meeting overrun

[kensoh]

Give us 5 min

[kensoh]

Thursday 25 Feb 2021, 400pm SGT (UTC+8)
Live Q&A # 5 - Zoom One-to-One Meeting URL

The weekly live Q&A will no longer stream to YouTube. Also, during the session, if there are more than 1 participant, we will go to the breakout room to go through questions from the participant 1 at a time. First come first serve.

These changes are to optimise the privacy of participants who join the Q&A, over the 'learning' aspect of the general public on YouTube or other participants on the call. There will be free Udemy-style course soon which serves the learning aspect.

[kensoh]

Thursday 4 Mar 2021, 4pm SGT (UTC+8)
Live Q&A # 6 - Zoom One-to-One Meeting URL

[kensoh]

Thursday 11 Mar 2021, 4pm SGT (UTC+8)
Live Q&A # 7 - Zoom One-to-One Meeting URL

[ruthtxh]

Closing this issue as per latest update here