TLDR: No! That’s not what we’re here for. Robotic process automation is here to help you. We often get called in to help a company automate a process. Many times this involves automating something that an end-user does. To make macros that make their job easier, less painful, and make them more productive. Initial Resistance […]
What is Screen Scraping? Screen Scraping is a term used to describe the process of a computer program or macro extracting data from the display output of another application. Rather than parsing data from the database or data files belonging to an application, Screen Scraping pulls the data from the screen itself, extracting data that […]
Before Macro Scheduler existed I was a junior member of an IT department. As part of my job I built small tools to automate specific tasks. At the time I was using VB. Each time I had to automate a task I had to reinvent the wheel a little. The whole point of Macro Scheduler […]
Here’s a little video Dorian has just put together to demonstrate the automation of data transfer from Excel into a web form:
Someone emailed today saying they were having problems trying to automate Internet Explorer 11 because it didn’t seem to have a window title. Actually IE11 does have a window title. Each tab has a different window title. But you don’t see the title in the main title bar of the application. By default applications show […]
This is a repost. The original article is here. Most of the time when we are automating a process we are able to predict the sequence of events. We are working with a deterministic process and a linear flow of actions. But there are occasions when things can happen during a process that we cannot […]
Here’s a way to get screen text from any application – even from an image – using OCR and a free open source tool called Tesseract. First, you need to download and install Tesseract. You can get it here. Tesseract is a command line utility. The most basic syntax is: tesseract.exe input_image_file output_text_file So you […]
Recently someone asked in the forums how to “Automatically Detect MS Office Install Location” so that they could run an Access macro. Well, there are ways to get the path of an installed Office application, but it isn’t necessary in order to run an Access macro. This is a rehash of my forum answer: You […]
This is a repost from 2006. One of the best ways to learn to use a software product fully is to try to automate it. Testers and automators have to learn the software’s interface really well, possibly better than the people who wrote it. Ok, the developers know the algorithms better than anyone else, but […]
If you’re new to automating IE/websites with WebRecorder or the native Macro Scheduler IE functions you may be wondering how to determine which elements and attributes to use. In this video I demonstrate how to use IE’s F12 key to invoke Developer Tools and use that to quickly find the elements we’re interested in and […]