Macro Recording and Automating Windows with Macro Scheduler – Tips & News
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 […]
A recent post in the forums asks how to consume a SOAP service with Macro Scheduler. View the post for some techniques and examples.
As you know Macro Scheduler has Telnet, FTP and HTTP functions built in (and with v11 FTP/HTTP will support SSL). But what if you want to run some other secure protocol such as SSH? We’ve taken the view not to reinvent the wheel and add every possible secure communications protocol to Macro Scheduler, especially as […]
Here’s a quick way to extract just the filename from a full path: Let>file_path=C:\Program files\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe //get the file name on its own Separate>file_path,\,parts Let>exe_name=parts_%parts_count% //now get just the folder path MidStr>file_path,1,{length(%file_path%)-length(%exe_name%)},folder_only This uses Separate to explode the path into an array using the ‘\’ character as the delimiter. We’ve called the array “parts”. “parts_count” contains […]
VBScript and Complex Expressions use the ” (double quote) character to delimit strings. Native MacroScript code doesn’t need delimited strings. But if you need to use Complex Expressions or VBScript you need to remember that strings must be delimited in quotes. One implication of this is that if the string already has a ” character […]
By default in Macro Scheduler you do not have to do anything special to refer to a variable. The following will create a variable called Name: Let>Name=Freddy Name is now assigned the value of Freddy. Referring to Variables: The following will display a message box containing the word “Freddy”: MessageModal>Name Macro Scheduler knows that Name […]
With the latest release (10.1.15) we worked on optimizing the way variables are stored internally and were able to dramatically improve performance. Dick Lockey did some tests and writes that the latest version is 40 times faster than earlier versions! If you’re working with scripts that create and process a large number of variables – […]
There are various scripts on the forums demonstrating how to automate Internet Explorer via VBScript and IE’s Document Object Model. Such as this one: Automate web forms with IE These require that the script creates the Internet Explorer instance via a CreateObject call. The script then has access to the IE object and can access […]
If you have macros in Microsoft Word, Excel or Access they will be written in VBA – Visual Basic for Applications. If you wish to use this code inside Macro Scheduler you can convert this code to VBScript. However you cannot just copy the code and paste it into Macro Scheduler – or even into […]
UPDATE: 25/09/2012 – Macro Scheduler now includes some native Excel functions (XLOpen, XLGetCell, XLSetCell) etc. DDE is also no longer supported in the latest version of Excel. Using DBQuery, as described here, is still a very useful way to retrieve Excel data, especially for doing SQL style lookups. Last July I wrote this post summarising […]