[Open] Ability to Sort Groups and change back to 'No Group'

jpuziano · Post by **jpuziano** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 5:44 am

Hi Marcus,

I am using Groups more now; it makes it easier to locate a particular Macro if you have well named groups... they look like folder names in File Explorer. However, unlike File Explorer, they don't sort alphabetically and it seems that once created, they can't be manually sorted (moved up/down) either.

When you select the topmost "All Macros" folder, you can add a new group and no matter what you name it, it pops in at the bottom. Over time, you may have added a lot of groups and no doubt, the group names will not be in alphabetical order.

Lets say you have 10 groups and want to re-order them. You would have to:

- create a new set of 10 groups in the order you want them to show up
- you can't use the exact same name as the old group, add an extra char on the end to each group name
- select all macros from the old group and click and drag them over to the corresponding new group, repeat for all 10
- once all 10 have been done, delete the old group names
- finally, rename each new group name to be the same as the old group names were (delete the extra char on the end)

Possible... but tedious... especially if you are always adding new groups and you'd like to keep them sorted.

If adding the ability to have the groups sort alphabetically automatically is difficult, how about this. Right click on a group and the right-click menu offers Move Up and Move Down. So with a few clicks, we could move favorite groups to the top or reorder as we like.

One last thing. Many of my macros do not belong to a group, the Group column is blank. That is on purpose. In testing out a few things, I clicked and dragged one of these macros into a particular group. Then I wanted to put the macro back the way it was i.e. I didn't want it to belong to any group. I was surprised to find that I couldn't do that. I could change the group it belonged to but could not blank it out.

In my opinion, if you can create a macro that does not belong to any group... and you can set it to belong to any group... then you should be able to set it back the way it was. All it would take I guess would be to add "blank" as a choice in the dropdown on the Properties Tab where we can set which group a macro belongs to.

Now that BugTracker is no more, please reply to let me know if these enhancement ideas are already in the "wish list", will be added or if there is a way of doing any of this already.

Thanks for listening and have a great day

jpuziano · Post by **jpuziano** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 7:44 am

Hi Marcus,

Any word on if any of this is possible, on the wish list or...?

Thanks

Post by **Marcus Tettmar** » Mon Jan 18, 2010 8:30 am

The ability to sort groups is on the watch list. I'm not convinced about the merits of moving a macro to "no group" but will consider it.

jpuziano · Post by **jpuziano** » Mon Jan 18, 2010 5:19 pm

mtettmar wrote:The ability to sort groups is on the watch list.

I'm thinking you meant Wish List and if so, sounds good, thanks.

mtettmar wrote:I'm not convinced about the merits of moving a macro to "no group" but will consider it.

Well I am doing it now anyway. My manual workaround is to copy the macro, then delete it, then re-create it with no group. Rather than being "sent around the houses", I'd just like to be able to re-set it back to "no group" directly.

Thanks for the reply and for considering this... take care.

Bob Hansen · Post by **Bob Hansen** » Tue Jan 19, 2010 8:13 pm

Don't have access now, but could you put into "No Group" by editing the group.dat and/or groups.ini and/or macros.dat files?

In version 11 these are located in My Documents\Macro Scheduler\ folder.

jpuziano · Post by **jpuziano** » Tue Jan 19, 2010 8:45 pm

Bob Hansen wrote:could you put into "No Group" by editing the group.dat and/or groups.ini and/or macros.dat files?

Hi Bob,

That's an interesting thought... I guess I could:

look at the entries in those files for a macro that was not yet associated to a group
associate that macro to a group
look again to see if/how the entries for the macro (in all of those files) had changed
try manually making the same changes (back and forth) and see if that works

The caveat here is... perhaps the Macro Scheduler app keeps some or all of the values from these files in memory and if I go in and make my own changes in those files... I might get some strange results as what will be in the files will not agree with what MS has in memory.

At worst, I might end up corrupting my group.dat, groups.ini and/or macros.dat files. If that happened, I could hardly blame Macro Scheduler as I was messing about with internals.

This is not something I'd recommend anyone doing... and I think Marcus might feel the same way. Macrus, any thoughts?

For now, I have a manual workaround, I'll just keep doing that. If Marcus decides to make this easier in the App, great.

If not, I'll just probably keep doing what I'm doing... its not really that big of a deal... but I do thank you for thinking about this and taking the time to post your ideas... appreciated as always.

Take care