Power automate how to open a file with a different app

Question

I need to open a file with an app that is not a default app for this file, in other words to right click on a file and go to open with, and select the app I want to open the file with, is there a way to create a flow for that in PA?

Answer 1

You can use the System -> Run application action to start almost anything with almost any file.

Suppose you have a file "myfile.csv" with full path in variable MyFile, and you would like to open it with Notepad instead of default Excel.

First, you need to have the location of the executable, which you can find easily in PowerShell using the following dialog (note: XXXX denotes current user):

PS > where.exe notepad
C:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe
C:\Windows\notepad.exe
C:\Users\XXXX\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\notepad.exe

With that, you would add action Run application with application name "C:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe" and argument %MyFile%. For After application launch, select "Wait for application to load". You'll get an application process ID and window handle back to use for any UI automation. For example, Focus window can use a window handle.