Marcus' Macro Scheduler Blog

What is it with the packaging you get computer stuff in?

This is that horrible thick plastic stuff. You almost need a hacksaw to get into it. I just about managed with a pen knife. And you have to be careful – this stuff is sharp. There’s more plastic in the packaging than the product in this case. Not exactly environmentally friendly. A cardboard box would be perfectly adequate.

If you haven’t already heard about the Excel bug, open up Excel 2007 and try multiplying 77.1 with 850:

=77.1*850

Clearly that should give you 65,535. But Excel 2007 returns 100,000. Oops.

It turns out it’s just a presentational bug. The displayed result is wrong, but the underlying value is correct. If you were to create a graph or access the value from VBA, you’d get the right result. Read Joel’s post for a clear explanation of why this is.

Speaking of Office 2007, I had a near disaster with Outlook today when it refused to work. It crashed on startup, and kept trying to restart itself, only to crash again. Got it sorted in the end. But I’ve been meaning to implement a decent backup solution for Outlook since I switched to it a few months ago. So today I installed BackupOutlook from our friends at Wisco. Does the job nicely. If you’re looking for a decent Outlook Backup tool you should check it out.

There’s a great deal on Direct Access, one of my favourite apps, over on Bits du Jour today. 40% off. Today only. Go grab it.

Direct Access lets you assign textual abbreviations to applications and other actions on your PC. Say you want to open Microsoft Word, you can just type “word” wherever you are, whatever application you’re working on. You can also create text substitutions. E.g. you could be writing an email and type “sign” and it will replace “sign” with your signature. Of course, there’s a confirmation key so you have to hit Shift, or F12 to confirm these actions. Otherwise I’d have opened Word three times and inserted my signature twice while trying to write this post 🙂

Direct Access is a really smart tool, written by my good friend Andrea Nagar of Nagarsoft. Please do check it out. I don’t often recommend other people’s software, but I just love Direct Access.

Did you know Macro Scheduler has a résumé? Check it out here:

I work 24X7 for no pay! Got a job?

Know anyone who needs an employee like that (well, who doesn’t)? Please pass it on.

I just stumbled across a couple of posts in another automation product’s forum where someone was asking how to perform date calculations in their automation routines.

In Macro Scheduler you can add or subtract days to a date with one line of code. E.g.:

Sub>date,1

Or, for more advanced date calculations and formatting, you can use a few lines of simple VBScript code, right inside your macro. Here’s a link to an article I wrote on handling dates in Macro Scheduler.

The official solution to the forum post from our competitor’s tech support person was to have the macro manipulate Excel. Yes, to perform a date calculation you are supposed to write steps to open Excel, send keystrokes to it, paste in a formula, send keystrokes to copy the result to the clipboard, and then retrieve that to a variable, which must itself be created in some convoluted manner. Phew!

Imagine doing that inside a loop that iterates several hundred times. Not exactly portable or elegant, and rather prone to error. And anyway, what if you don’t have Excel installed on the computer the macro needs to run on?

Ok, so you’re thinking: “so what, this tool is probably a low end product”. Well get this, the basic version costs MORE than Macro Scheduler Std. The business edition (still with the same [lack of] functionality) costs over FOUR times more than our Macro Scheduler Pro Enterprise package.

If you’re fed up with the limitations of your automation tool and want to switch to the real deal, drop us a line and we’ll offer you a competitive upgrade discount. You know it makes sense.

Edauthier posted a script to the forum which invokes Merlin the Wizard with a little message for you. I had to make a few small changes. I also compiled it into an EXE.

Here’s the code. Download a zip file containing the EXE. Just run it. Enjoy.

Received this nice email today, and just had to share it. Emphasis mine:

Dear Marcus

Yours Sincerely,
Gerry Pentleton
ERA UK

Looking at our referrer logs it seems we get quite a few visitors linking through from our listing at:

http://www.itlocation.com/en/software/prd46729,,.htm

But I notice there’s no user review yet. Care to add one?