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UAMike

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Everything posted by UAMike

  1. I'd like to be able to use the F1 Key as a program-specific hotkey to serve as the delete button so that I can delete a line in the Editor with my left hand. When I hit the key, it pops up the help menu, which I don't care to ever see using a hotkey. Is there a way to reclaim this reserved key? On my old machine, this worked without issue, but I am not sure if it's because of an older MEP version, the fact that I was using a virtual desktop, or because of some other tweaking I did.
  2. I work in the healthcare field and my job performance is based primarily on production metrics. I review medical information, make a clinical decision, and populate a document based on my findings. Over the course of the last 10 years, I have used MEP to automate virtually all aspects of my job (with the exception of having to make a clinical decision) to the point where I could, in theory, be twice as productive as the highest producer in my department. I say in theory because after being fired at my last job for being suspiciously too productive, I have made it a point to fly under the radar so as not to raise any eyebrows as to what I’m doing. But just as I’ve automated a lot of my work, so too has my employer, not unlike so many businesses worldwide, and now I find myself in a race to increase my efficiency in order to meet higher and higher production goals. I disagree so strongly with some of the things we’ve implemented that are meant to be time savers… they were designed either by people with no clinical background, or no knack for automation. What do I do? It would be hard share what I’ve done with members of my management, who aren’t themselves high-level decision makers or particularly tech savvy to know what they’re looking at. I would see this playing out any number of ways: I could be fired for violating some policy (time wasting or something like that). They wouldn’t see any value in what I’ve done or not really be in a position to do something about it other than give me a pat on the back. In the best case scenario, I think they would see the value in it and want to implement these ideas… but as you all know, these macro often require maintenance, tweaking, workarounds, and do not have the polish of a professional program. All this to say that I feel sort of stuck. I know what MEP has done for me and how it has changed the way that I work and even the way that I think, but what do I do with this skill? Knowing how to use MEP doesn’t make me a software developer, but I think that the skills I’ve acquired could be applied to so many processes or for so many companies. How can I leverage these skills and present them to my employer, or a future employer?
  3. I'm trying to hide and show several windows at the same time. Plus, alt-tabbing and picking the correct window would probably end up being more keystrokes even if I just needed to access one window. Will do
  4. I have macros that display several text boxes simultaneously on the screen and use two separate hotkey macros to show and hide them. I'd like to be able to instead just use one hotkey that would determine whether the windows are visible and then hide them, or make them visible when they are hidden, but I cannot find a way to do this. The closest command I can find that would help with this task is "If Window is focused", but the text boxes that I am using aren't meant to grab focus unless I specifically click on them. Is there a way to achieve this 'toggle' macro that I am wanting to create?
  5. Yes confidentiality is an issue... I wish I could show you so you'd have a better idea, but the best I could do right now is a few screenshots taken with my phone. I can't think off the top of my head of a web site that behaves like this... probably because it's not best practice to build sites this way. This is a good idea and I will try to experiment with neutral zones some more. In the attached screenshots, you'll see that I've clicked in such a way as to outline the outer border of this big box, which I now realize is embedded within a larger box that takes up the entire browser window. There is no clickable left margin outside of the outer box, and the slimmest of margins on the right side, although I think this is where the browser's scroll bar would be if the page was long enough. One new discovery is that there are buttons on the top and bottom of the page that are findable and clickable using the ctrl+f method. Since they're only at the top and bottom, though, it's they're not all that useful for tabbing to somewhere in the middle of the page.
  6. The Ctrl+f is the first thing I tried. That's my bread and butter for most things I try to do inside a web browser. It doesn't work because after I press ESC, pressing tab or shift-tab will bring me to the first or last field respectively.
  7. My employer started using a new web-based app and I need help on how I can focus on specific text fields. My go-to method in the past was to use the search function in Chrome to find specific text and then tab to the correct place from there, but it doesn't seem that this method will work in this new app. The reason this is not working for me is that the webpage has a massive embedded field where all the individual text boxes are located (Not sure what the right term for this is... but it has it's own scroll bar if that helps explain). So, when I search for specific text, as soon as I try to tab somewhere, it shoots me back to the first text field within this larger embedded box. I've tried a few other things so far... Just tabbing to the right field: I think this won't work because certain fields are sometimes greyed out and I can't predict when this will be the case. I might need to further explore this method to see if I can determine if this is possible. Using controls in MEP: I've never actually done this before, but following the MEP help file, I don't think it's possible because MEP isn't recognizing individual text boxes when I used the crosshairs to set the control. In my first attempt, I thought I had it working because it jumped to the right field, but I wasn't able to recreate this when I picked a different field to click on... not really sure what to make of this. Searching for pixel colors: I've used this in the past and it's pretty slow and unreliable. I know some people in this forum can attest to that. I wouldn't mind using this method if there just one or two fields I needed to get to, but that isn't the case here. Plus, I think the fact that there's a scrollbar involved would only further complicate things. Are there any other methods I should explore?
  8. I saw a macro on this forum some time ago that when through the steps of selecting a background color and I used it as the starting place for a macro that sets all of my custom colors. Instead of picking one of the set colors, it tabs over to the RGB fields and fills them in from integer values that I have defined in an array. This has to be done every time MEP is restarted. It works, but I haven't yet decided whether it's worth the trouble. As I am writing this, it is occurring to me that instead of setting the RGB values, you could instead use Hue/Sat/Luma and perform a calculation (let's say... divide luma by 2 or whatever you think looks nice) to get perfectly offset text/background colors.
  9. Thank you, this is what I was hoping to accomplish. I never knew what I would do with the "set integer to the length of a variable"... but now I know and it's a valuable tool that I can add to my arsenal. I will also have to explore what I can do with "Set to position of text in a text variable"
  10. I think I over-complicated my ask when I mentioned the bit about PDFs. The main point was that I wanted to extract values from a long string, which I do quite frequently in a number of macros that I use, except I was hoping to speed up the process by jumping to the end of the string.
  11. Part of one of my macros is dedicated to counting the number of pages in an embedded PDF document. This is accomplished in a chrome browser by issuing a Ctrl+A, saving the clipboard text to a variable %clipboard%, then running a loop that counts down and searches for the text "of 50" "of 49" "of 48" (ie. Page 1 of 48) etc. The macro itself works just fine, but is quite slow. I assume this is because it has to check the contents of a rather large string. I was wondering if there was a way to shorten the string to make the process quicker. The text "Page 1 of XX" always comes at the end of the string but it is impossible to predict how many characters will lead up to it, so I can't use the function to delete or copy part of a string. Is there a smarter way of accomplishing this task? If only MEP allowed you to modify a string starting at the end...
  12. lol yeah, I guess I'll just live with this problem. Some of these standard ASCII values seem a bit strange and not very useful, whereas I would think that ≥ and ≤ are more universally known and used 😩
  13. I've also tried using 242 and 243 without luck. Like you mentioned, it seems to end up as ò or ó
  14. Is MEP to handle "≥" and "≤" characters? When I save a string variable containing one of these, they inevitably get turned into "=". In fact, it doesn't even seem like the editor can handle these characters... they always just turn into the "=" symbol. I would like MEP to recognize these characters and then convert them to their text form. My thought was to use the command "Variable set to ASCII Char", but I don't believe that there is a number that corresponds to these symbols.
  15. @acantor @terrypin Alan and Terry, I've tested out both of these macros and they both work great! Many thanks for your hard work!
  16. This works really nicely! In order to bump the pointer to the next digit, I modified the command: Variable Modify String: Copy Part of %T1% starting at %N99% and 1 characters long to %T89%. This only works using 1 digit numbers, but it will work for my purposes. Thank you!
  17. I was trying to keep it simple for myself by only have 1 digit numbers, as this would work for my purposes 99% of the time. My plan was to use statements like: If Variable %string% contains "1" and I realized that this would get misinterpreted if I used two digit numbers. But it sounds like you're suggesting I use a space delimiter... can you give me an example of how this would work?
  18. I am trying to create a macro that takes a string of digits (1-9) input by the user and outputs it as a list in a grammatically correct format (using an Oxford comma if applicable). For example, the user inputs "12345" and the output is is "1, 2, 3, 4, and 5" "45" => "4 and 5" "7" => "7" "389" => "3, 8, and 9" Let's assume that the user only inputs a digit a maximum of one time (ie: no "1123") and would only enter the digits in numerical order (ie: "123", not "321") This is a macro I've wanted to make for a long time and I'm trying to determine what the best approach for creating it would be. Any thoughts/ideas would be appreciated.
  19. I'm glad I'm not the only one who has experienced a slow down with regards to mouse operations in W10. Unfortunately I can't access this forum at work and have no good/acceptable way of sending a sample macro to myself. But as you pointed out, the coordinate method sounds like a better solution and I am going to test that out!
  20. Thanks Alan! I am going to try implementing this method and see how it works out. It seems like it would be much more efficient and reliable... I'm embarrassed for not having thought of it and instead relying on mouse moves 🤣
  21. I wish I could test this, but I don't have a W10 machine. Not only that, but there are so many work-related security barriers that there's no good way for me to get my macros off my work pc to post here short of transcribing them by hand. I can't even access this forum 😪. Checked the color depth but they are the same on both VMs. I can't run MEP as admin. Thanks for the input.
  22. I am using MEP 4.6.2.1 on my two virtual machines at work. They both share the same macro files. One of them was recently updated to Windows 10 (The other is a Windows 7 machine) and I am finding MEP to be extremely slow for some functions. The Script Editor is pretty much unusable and stops responding just as soon as it is opened. Another issue I am struggling with is with a macro that moves the mouse a few pixels at a time to find the right color. The macro uses a loop to move up, down, left, and right hundred of times or until it finds the right spot. This works just fine in Windows 7, but in Windows 10, there is tremendous lag. I've tried increasing the playback speed of the macro to no avail. Is it just something with the version compatibility with the OS, or something else that I should be looking at?
  23. Thanks for the input. I agree that this would work... however, due to the fact that I am getting my data from a shared/synced OneNote document, I wouldn't be able to add the nonsense string as would be called for using this method.
  24. Thanks for the info. I am trying this method but I am sure that I am misunderstanding something. I declared the variable as you suggested: Variable Set to ASCII Char 9 to %Tab% Variable Set to ASCII Char 10 to %LF% Variable Set to ASCII Char 13 to %CR% I am not getting the desired outcome. Where do you put the %LF% and %CR% variable within the Modify String command? I tried putting it in 'text to replace' ("-A%LF%%CR%") but then it ends up trying to replace %LF%%CR% as a string value.
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