Macro Recording and Automating Windows with Macro Scheduler – Tips & News
In this forum post Armsys asks how he can determine which key the user pressed in an OnKeyPress dialog event handler. The solution I posted reveals an undocumented feature: Internal event parameters. While there is a sample macro called “Dialogs – MouseOver” which ships with Macro Scheduler and demonstrates these event parameters, they are missing […]
A support request came in today asking how to show the mouse moving from one point to another slowly enough to be visible in a video demo. The regular MouseMove function simply “jumps” the mouse cursor straight to the given point, without passing any points between wherever it was to start with and that end […]
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. […]
The other day I posted a response on the forums which uses LibFunc to run the Win32 API function GetKeyState. This prompted someone to email me the following: I didn’t know the Win API call to check for a key being down. The API call works but have you considered adding a native MS command […]
In the comments to my last post Richard asked how we can wait for a process to finish updating a file. In my reply to Richard I point out that most of the time we can use a visual cue. Where possible this is the approach I would use. Usually an application would present some […]
Today I was helping someone who was wanting to write a script to take screen-shots from one application and then paste those screen-shots into Microsoft Excel. Initially things weren’t working reliably because the script didn’t factor in the time taken for the large bitmap of a screen-shot to exist in the clipboard after pressing the […]
Forum regular JRL has come up with yet another great coding example, with a demonstration of how to jazz up your dialogs by displaying an animated image – a great way to represent progress of an activity. Here it is. In fact this example shows how any window can be embedded into a dialog by […]
Edit: 23 March 2011. In Version 12 it is possible to make a dialog stay on top simply by setting the dialog’s FormStyle property to fsStayOnTop. The method outlined in this post is not necessary for v12 dialogs but will remain as it can be used for older versions and the same approach can be […]
Macro Scheduler has a number of scheduling features to allow you to specify when a macro should fire. One of these mechanisms is called a Trigger. There are several trigger types: Window Event File Event Folder Event Custom Event A Window Event can be set to fire when a specified window appears or disappears. Similarly […]
When sending keystrokes to other applications remember that Macro Scheduler works much faster than a human being can type. Many applications do form field verification or background processing on the fly as the text is received. And most applications were designed on the assumption that a human being would be operating them. It may not […]