I just stumbled across a couple of posts in another automation product’s forum where someone was asking how to perform date calculations in their automation routines.

In Macro Scheduler you can add or subtract days to a date with one line of code. E.g.:

Sub>date,1

Or, for more advanced date calculations and formatting, you can use a few lines of simple VBScript code, right inside your macro. Here’s a link to an article I wrote on handling dates in Macro Scheduler.

The official solution to the forum post from our competitor’s tech support person was to have the macro manipulate Excel. Yes, to perform a date calculation you are supposed to write steps to open Excel, send keystrokes to it, paste in a formula, send keystrokes to copy the result to the clipboard, and then retrieve that to a variable, which must itself be created in some convoluted manner. Phew!

Imagine doing that inside a loop that iterates several hundred times. Not exactly portable or elegant, and rather prone to error. And anyway, what if you don’t have Excel installed on the computer the macro needs to run on?

Ok, so you’re thinking: “so what, this tool is probably a low end product”. Well get this, the basic version costs MORE than Macro Scheduler Std. The business edition (still with the same [lack of] functionality) costs over FOUR times more than our Macro Scheduler Pro Enterprise package.

If you’re fed up with the limitations of your automation tool and want to switch to the real deal, drop us a line and we’ll offer you a competitive upgrade discount. You know it makes sense.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 8:50 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.