Macro Recording and Automating Windows with Macro Scheduler – Tips & News
[UPDATE: 27.3.2018 – Since this article was written Macro Scheduler now has built in Screen OCR functions] We often need to write scripts that extract text from a window or some area of the screen. Usually this can be achieved via the clipboard, or commands such as GetWindowText and GetControlText, or via a Win32 API […]
Recent research from Computacenter and Fujitsu Siemens finds that the 200 largest UK companies waste £61m a year on unneeded electricity by using power-hungry, inefficient PCs. This wasted electricity equates to over 2.8 million kWh of energy. Of course the recommendations from Computacenter and Fujitsu Siemens are that these businesses should throw out their desktops […]
When running command line tools, applications or batch files it is often necessary to watch the resultant command window. E.g. to detect their completion you can have the script wait until the command window has closed. The trouble with this is that when you run batch files the title of the command window is always […]
Someone sparked an interesting thread in the Macro Scheduler forums recently when they asked if it was possible to activate a macro by detecting a click on a specific area of the screen. They wanted to know if you could define a portion of the screen so that if a click is detected in that […]
Scheduling User Interface (UI) automation macros to occur when Windows is logged off or locked is problematic. A full user session needs to be active for a UI macro to work. Why is this? Windows consists of “Window Stations” and “Desktops”. A window station is a secure object that contains a clipboard, a set of […]
Want to automate a mouse wheel event? I posted an answer in the forum showing how to do this here: Roll the mouse wheel?
Probably the simplest way to parse XML, such as an RSS feed, is to use Microsoft’s MSXML object which is built into Windows. I wrote a very quick and dirty routine using MSXML2 to download and parse this blog’s RSS feed. All it does is put the title, link and content of each item into […]
This is the 10th commandment of system administration according to Brian Warshawsky’s article “Ten Commandments of system administration” over at NewsForge. I couldn’t agree more. You’ll find the article with links to the other nine commandments here. These articles are for Linux administrators so much of the content and the example scripts won’t be much […]
These are my tips for getting started with writing an automation script. While I’m, writing this with our Windows Automation tool, Macro Scheduler, in mind, these tips will be appropriate whichever automation tool you are using. The most important thing before attempting to write a routine to automate a software process is to be familiar […]
As mentioned in my last post, the easiest, most reliable way to automate an application is via keyboard shortcuts. But I’ve found that many people are so used to using the mouse that they don’t even realise you can use the keyboard to move around Windows applications. Some things I take for granted are completely […]