Macro Recording and Automating Windows with Macro Scheduler – Tips & News
An interesting discussion arose in the forums yesterday on how to read data from a CSV file. The usual suggestion is to use Separate to split each line into an array using the comma as the delimiter, as explained in my post here. The problem, as highlighted in the forum topic, is: what if the […]
I don’t know many people who find Regular Expressions easy. If the following makes no sense to you, don’t worry, you’re not alone: ([a-z0-9!#$%&’*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&’*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*@(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?) It’s actually a regular expression pattern which will match an email address in a string. I’m sure you knew that. At present to use Regular Expressions in Macro Scheduler you have […]
Macro Scheduler has a “View System Windows” tool which you can get to from the Tools menu. This displays a tree of all windows, their child windows and objects open in the system. For each entity you see its handle, class name and title/caption text. The help file talks about windows and child windows. For […]
Macro Scheduler has a Random function which will give you a random number between a specified range. Every now and then I am asked how you can create a random character or random character string. The solution is to use VBScript’s Chr function which returns the character for the specified Ascii code. So we can […]
Every now and then, in the forums and in emails to us, there seems to be some confusion over what these terms mean. As a developer I take these terms for granted, but anyone else, depending on their walk of life, might think they refer to some kind of Modal Jazz; something to do with […]
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 […]
Recently in a forum post, “Getting New Email Message counts” terencepjf asked: Does anyone know a way to get a count of New Email messages: 1) Without downloading all the messages 2) Count of messages in Inbox Sub-Folders RetrievePOP3 works but the files need to be downloaded.” My answer is to use the Telnet functions. […]
If you’ve ever had to write code to read through large text files looking for patterns of text and extracting data you’ll know how fiddly it can be, even with Macro Scheduler‘s simple file reading and text parsing functions. Well, there’s an amazing tool called TextPipe from DataMystic which makes extracting and transforming text data […]
The other day a customer had a problem. He wanted to use this VBScript code to trigger macros in Microsoft Excel workbooks. The trouble is that his company’s Excel security settings are set so that macros in non-signed Excel workbooks pop up a warning dialog. The customer has to click a button to enable macros […]
Over the years I’ve helped many people improve their automation scripts. The most common two causes of scripts failing to work correctly and consistently are timing and focus issues. Here I’ve tried to summarise the main things you should do to make your scripts more reliable. Try to avoid mouse clicks. Mouse clicks require screen […]