Macro Recording and Automating Windows with Macro Scheduler – Tips & News
If you’re into Pool, watch out for Jonni Fulcher in the 2007 World Pool Championships 3rd to 11th November. We are proud to be one of his sponsors. So good luck Jonni!
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.
The last time I tried speech recognition was about 15 years ago and back then it wasn’t very good. I suppose it was early days for the technology but I pretty much gave up on it. This morning, however, I was reading Scott Hanselman’s post about speech recognition in Vista and wanted to give it a go myself. It just so happened that I was in PC world today so I picked up a decent microphone, which I have been meaning to get for a while anyway – for product demos and Skype etc.
So when I got back I hooked up the microphone to my vista box and started playing with speech recognition. My goodness it is pretty amazing! In fact I am writing this post using dictation.
One really cool thing is that I can start Macro Scheduler macros using voice recognition by speaking the keyboard shortcuts assigned to them. This could be really handy in situations where voice recognition is needed for controlling complicated processes. E.g. Hands-busy medical applications, or for helping people with disabilities. Macros can be written to control those processes and assigned to shortcuts which can be triggered by voice commands. And all this is capable using Windows Vista without extra software (except Macro Scheduler of course).
QuickButtons makes it easier because you just have to say the text of a button rather than the shortcut key sequence. With QuickButtons you can create an AppBar with buttons assigned to keystroke macros, applications or Macro Scheduler macros. The AppBar can remain visible above or below the application you are working in. Just speak the caption of a button and that button is “clicked” and the macro is executed.
So not only have I learnt how cool Vista’s speech recognition is today, I’ve also discovered how it can be used with our very own Macro Scheduler and QuickButtons to great effect. Dedicated voice recognition software can cost thousands. Yet with Vista and Macro Scheduler and/or QuickButtons you can make voice recognition do anything for far less. Awesome.
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.
Macro Scheduler 9.1.05 maintenance update was released yesterday.
– Fixed: delay on some systems when saving scripts
– Fixed: Rare issue starting trial on Win2003 Svr RC2
– Fixed: SCRIPT_FILE variable showing garbage in compiled script
– Fixed: Possible “Invalid Pointer Operation” error on windows shutdown
Today we have released an update to WebRecorder:
WebRecorder GUI: 1.73
IEAuto.DLL: 1.79
Fixed: ContainsText unable to access content of some frames
Fixed: ExtractTag unable to access content of some frames
This update also correctly reports the version number of the WebRecorder GUI and the IEAuto.DLL version number. It now therefore works better with the online update checker and should be less confusing when checking for updates! 🙂
WebRecorder Info | Evaluation Downloads | Registered Updates
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.
Many support requests and forum posts I see include a script snippet and a statement like “this value is wrong” or “the if statement says false but it should be true”. So we make an intelligent guess and say “so perhaps the value you are comparing isn’t what you think it is. Use the debugger”.
Stepping through the debugger reveals answers to problems like this quickly. Another way of checking values is to use a diagnostic message box. Whack a line like this into the script:
MessageModal>%MyVariable%
And see if MyVariable is what you are expecting.
Here’s an article I wrote some time ago on how to use the debugger.
http://www.mjtnet.com/blog/2006/05/17/use-the-debugger/
Use it. Debug. Debug. Debug. Please.
Here’s a little script I wrote to give you a Date Picker dialog.
Useful if you need to ask the user to select a date and want to make it easy for the user and avoid too much validation.