Category: Automation

Controlling Apps that Run as Admin

October 30, 2012 by Marcus Tettmar in Automation, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8

By now you are probably aware of UAC (User Account Control) that came along when Vista was released. And you probably know that to do anything like copy files to Windows\System32 or Program Files or do other administrative stuff you need to be running as Admin, or you’ll get the UAC prompt come up asking […]

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My Most Used RegEx

October 29, 2012 by Marcus Tettmar in Automation, Scripting

It occurred to me the other day while working on a script for a customer that I use this regular expression frequently: (?<=TOKEN1).*?(?=TOKEN2) It is very useful when parsing information out of web pages, or when finding elements in web pages. What it does is pull out all the text between TOKEN1 and TOKEN2. Those […]

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Sending/Retrieving Emails via Gmail

October 3, 2012 by Marcus Tettmar in Automation, Scripting

Since version 13.2 Macro Scheduler‘s email functions now support SSL. Google’s Gmail and many other email services now insist on SSL secured connections. To use SSL you first need to install the OpenSSL library files. Here’s an example of sending an email via Gmail: Let>SMTP_AUTH=1 Let>[email protected] Let>SMTP_PASSWORD=your_password Let>SMTP_PORT=465 Let>SMTP_SSL=1 SMTPSendMail>[email protected],smtp.gmail.com,[email protected],your name,test,hello world, And to retrieve […]

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Sending Keys to Invisible or Unfocused Windows

March 27, 2012 by Marcus Tettmar in Automation, Scripting

Can you send keystrokes to invisible or unfocused windows? The answer is yes, if the control you want to send the keystrokes into is a “windowed control”. That is, one that has a handle. If that’s too technical just try using the “Send Keys to Object Wizard” in Macro Scheduler 13 which generates code that […]

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WebRecorder 3.0 – Faster, More Reliable, More Functions

January 24, 2012 by Marcus Tettmar in Automation, Web/Tech

We have today released WebRecorder 3.0. This is a major rewrite with a better recording engine capable of recording more tags and producing leaner, cleaner, code and a faster and more reliable runtime. It also introduces a download manager so that file downloads can be recorded and scripted more easily without recourse to sending keystrokes […]

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Scraping Data From Web Pages

May 20, 2011 by Marcus Tettmar in Automation, Scripting, Web/Tech

I’ve seen quite a lot of requests lately from people wanting to know how to extract text from web pages. Macro Scheduler’s optional WebRecorder add-on simplifies the automation of web pages and includes functions for extracting tables, text or HTML from web page elements. WebRecorder’s Tag Extraction wizard makes it easy to create the code. […]

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New Video: Using The Debugger

February 23, 2011 by Marcus Tettmar in Announcements, Automation, Scripting

Macro Scheduler veteran John Brozycki has put together this fantastic video tutorial all about Macro Scheduler’s debugging capabilities. The video is 18 minutes long and demonstrates every debug feature, showing examples of their use and talks about how useful the debugger can be for problem resolution as well as script creation. Take a look: A […]

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Mixing the Native Excel Functions with VBScript

December 15, 2010 by Marcus Tettmar in Automation, Scripting

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. […]

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