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Marcus' Macro Blog

Mostly tips, tutorials, articles and news about Macro Scheduler & Windows Automation

Archive for 2010

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Macro Scheduler 12.1.3 Available

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

Macro Scheduler 12.1.3 is now available with the following fixes since my last update announcement:

  • Fixed: RSS NewsFeed Window not timing out if a connection can’t be made. Added timeouts.
  • Fixed: Last file in GetFileList wrong if a delimiter with more than one character used.
  • Fixed: Macro Schedler Lite: Opening standalone editor causes crash.
  • Fixed: Help file incorrectly states timeout for Input command returns “YES”.
  • Fixed: Compiler: If compiling an include that cannot be found or is made up of user variables, include was removed. Should be left as dynamic include.
  • Fixed: Issue with comma in ExecuteFile – not parsed same as other commands.
  • Fixed: Editor: Files in code that are opened in new tab from context pop up menu are not saved correctly.
  • Fixed: Help file topic for FTPMakeDir had incorrect abbreviation and was not indexed.
  • Added: Image Capture tool now prompts if closed before captured image is saved.
  • Added: Codebuilders for image capture commands will now auto-fill the first parameter with the filename saved with the image capture tool.

Workflow Designer and the SDK have also been updated to the same MacroScript version.

Registered Downloads/Upgrades | Evaluation Downloads | New License Sales

Posted in Announcements | No Comments »

Automated Truck Tracking

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

The following was just posted over in the “Tell us how Macro Scheduler helps you, what you use it for.” forum thread:

We currently use it for two primary applications. One is to pull returning truck information out of a fleet management dispatch application for a produce brokerage company and dumping that information into a webpage for remote salespeople to use to find out where available empty trucks are located.

Secondly we use it to track trucks by integrating our dispatch application with google latitude. This automates what is called the Check Call process where a trucker would normally have to be contacted by phone. Now the script simply queries their latitude information and plugs that information into our dispatching application.

How do you benefit from using Macro Scheduler?

Posted in Success Stories | No Comments »

Video Tutorial – An Introduction to Custom Dialogs

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

A frequent request has been a video tutorial on creating and using dialogs. There’s a lot to dialogs and it’s impossible to address everything in one video so here’s a 10 minute introduction to get started with:

You might want to click here to view a larger size video, or click the full screen icon on the control panel above.

Hopefully this video serves as a useful starting point and we can move on to look at more objects and properties, setting property values at runtime and event handlers in future tutorials.

Posted in Tutorials | 1 Comment »

Mixing the Native Excel Functions with VBScript

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

Macro Scheduler comes complete with some native functions for controlling Excel, such as XLOpen, XLGetCell, XLSetCell and others. Obviously, although we intend to add more functions over time, not every possible Excel function has been duplicated. So sometimes you may want to utilise COM via VBScript which allows you to access the entire Excel API. There are plenty of examples of this here in the blog and on the forums.

But what if you want to use a combination of both? You might already have a script which uses the native XL functions to open a sheet and get or set some data. Let’s say you now want to augment this with an Excel method which is not exposed by the native functions. Rather than re-writing your entire script to use VBScript, is there a way we can let VBScript take over?

While it’s not possible to share native XL references with VBScript object references, what we can do is have VBScript attach to an open instance of Excel using the GetObject function. So sometime after running XLOpen we could then run a VBScript function which does a GetObject to get an object reference to Excel and then after that we are able to utlise any Excel function we like via VBScript.

The following script demonstrates:

VBSTART
  Dim xlApp
  Dim xlBook
  Sub GetXL
    Set xlApp = GetObject(,"Excel.Application")
    Set xlBook = xlApp.ActiveWorkbook
  End Sub

  Function FindCell(Sheet,Data)
    Dim theCell
    Dim xlValues
    xlValues = -4163

    Dim xlSheet
    Set xlSheet = xlBook.Worksheets(Sheet)
    xlSheet.Range("A1").Select
    Set theCell = xlSheet.Cells.Find(Data, xlApp.ActiveCell, xlValues)
    FindCell = CStr(theCell.Row) & ":" & CStr(theCell.Column)
  End Function
VBEND

//Open an XLS file natively
XLOpen>%SCRIPT_DIR%\example.xls,1,xlH

//Call GetXL to give VBScript a reference to the XL instance
VBRun>GetXL

//now we can access any XL function via VBScript
VBEval>FindCell("Sheet1","Price"),res

The only thing to be careful of is that there are no existing copies of Excel open before the one opened by XLOpen because according to the Microsoft docs GetObject will attach to the first opened instance. You could of course make the script check for this.

Posted in Automation, Scripting | No Comments »

15% Off T-Shirts Today at Zazzle

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

Thought I’d share this: I just noticed that Zazzle are currently offering 15% of all orders today (14th December) only with code JINGLESALE75. Also free shipping on orders over $50. More details are here. So if you were thinking of grabbing a shirt (even if it’s not one of ours!) now could be a good time!

Posted in Announcements, General | No Comments »

Macro Scheduler T-Shirts and Merchandise

Monday, December 13th, 2010

With Christmas round the corner I thought I might post a reminder that we have a number of official logo T-shirts, mugs and mouse mats available via Zazzle.com:

Posted in Announcements, General | No Comments »

Workflow Designer 3.0.01 Update

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

A minor update to Workflow Designer 3 today as well: When attempting to open script code in the Macro Scheduler editor it would fail to find the Macro Scheduler 12 editor and instead try to open the Macro Scheduler 11.x editor. So if you had v11 installed it would open in that. If you only had v12 installed it would fail to open at all. 3.0.01 fixes this so that it first tries v12 and then only tries to open in v11 if v12 is not found.

Registered users can download the update from the registered downloads page. Evaluation versions are here.

Workflow Designer ships with Macro Scheduler Pro Enterprise.

Posted in Announcements | No Comments »

Macro Scheduler 12.1.2 Update – AutoLogon Installer Fix

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

Macro Scheduler 12.1.2 is now available for download from the usual locations (registered updates | trial versions).

This is actually just a change to the AutoLogon component installer and not to the core product. We found a small error in the way the AutoLogon component was being configured in the registry which was preventing it from working properly on some customer systems.

So if you were having problems getting AutoLogon to work please download this update. If you do not use AutoLogon you do not need to update.

Posted in Announcements | No Comments »

Video Tutorial – Macro Scheduler for Non-Technical Beginners – Part 2

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

Another contribution from Peter Begelsdorf which takes off from where his last video left off. Aimed at complete beginners this video demonstrates how to execute a file and wait for it to be ready before sending text and keystrokes to it.

Part 1 of this sequence and other videos can be found on the Video Tutorials Page.

This video is a result of my recent offer for free licenses and updates in exchange for video tutorial contributions. If you want to have a go at creating a tutorial please let me know.

Posted in Announcements, Automation, Tutorials | No Comments »

Video Tutorial – Macro Scheduler for Non-Technical Beginners – Part 1

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Following my recent request for video tutorial contributions long-time Macro Scheduler user Peter Begelsdorf has stepped up to the plate and put together a short tutorial aimed at the non-technical beginner.

This slick three minute video introduces the fundamental, yet very important, SendText and Press commands and shows beginners how to create a simple text macro assigned to a hot key.

Peter is now planning to create a sequel to expand on the basics and explain how to execute a file and wait for a program to be ready.

While many of my regular readers may be amongst the more technical and experienced Macro Scheduler users I think these new videos will be a great help to newcomers to the software.

Peter Bengelsdorf is a media integration consultant who was a newspaper editor when he started using Macro Scheduler more than a decade ago. For his contribution Peter has been awarded free future Macro Scheduler updates and a WebRecorder license.

If you would like to create a video tutorial or have ideas for one, please let me know. We’re giving away licenses and future upates to video contributors.

This tutorial has been added to the Video Tutorials page.

Posted in Announcements, General, Tutorials | No Comments »

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