cuppanews

Thanks. I guess it makes sense that Excel would behave this way. Interesting. Your suggestion of a macro to get around this is good. I'll give it a shot.

Thanks, Randall. Yes, it is a "saved as" CSV file maintained in Excel and not a native Excel spreadsheet.

I'm using a CSV file with the ASCII File Process command for a lookup table. Everything is working really well so far, with one wrinkle. I'm adding new rows to the table in Excel every day, and I often have it open while I'm using the ME macro that processes the data. When the file's open in Excel, the macro fails. I'm puzzled by this. Why is the file not available to other applications while it's being edited? Obviously the saved version on the disk is the only one the macro can see, but if I save after every change in Excel, I'd have thought that ME would be able to use it even though it was still open in Excel. Is that not the case? Thanks.

When I click on, say, the "Macros" menu in the Scripting Editor toolbar, the menu "slides" down into view rather than simply being displayed. It's fun the first time. ;-) I thought it might be an OS thing (although it does't happen in other applications). Sure enough, in Desktop > Appearance > Effects, the first item seems to apply here -- but changing it doesn't have any effect in this case.

Just wanted to mention that I finally got around to this over the past few days. I ended up using a CSV file and the ASCII File Process command -- and it works perfectly! I am SO impressed! The table has only 68 rows right now, but the lookup feels instantaneous. Thanks again for the pointers.

Thanks, Randall.

Hi... I want to take a URL and extract the domain name. I've written a macro that does this, but since it's something that's critical to my workflow, I'd like to ask for your thoughts. Is this the best way to do what I want? Are there any obvious flaws in what I've done? The aim here is to get the domain name into T4. The URL is in T2, a variable that is restored when the macro begins. Thanks for your help! M.

In the interests of encouraging remarks in macros, how about making "Insert Remark" a right-click command in the Scripting Editor?

Hi... Is it possible to turn off the animated menus in the Scripting Editor? The "dropdown" effect is giving me motion-sickness. If it isn't, could this be added in some future version? Thanks!

Hi Randall... Thanks for the followup. That link isn't working for me. What is the URL?

Thanks, Kevin! I think I see what you're suggesting, although %T10% would actually be a domain name, something like "www.chinadaily.com". I'll start experimenting with this. I appreciate your help.

Sorry, I guess I didn't express it very clearly. I'm using ME to grab certain information from, let's say, a New York Times article. I get the article title, a short selection of the article text, and the URL. Then I paste that information into a webform, clean it up as needed, and post it on my site. I've got ME macros already written that help with most of this. One of the things I've been adding manually in the webform is a field called "Source". Until now, I've actually been typing out "US-New York Times" or whatever the source is for every item I post. That's the part I'd like to automate. ME already has the URL (as one of the macros I'm already using), so I'd like first to strip it down to domain name only. That I can figure out without help. Here's the part I do need help with: I'd like to search a table for the domain name and have ME return the "long form" of the name. For instance, a simple example of the table might look something like this: domain name long form name ----------- -------------- www.nytimes.com US-New York Times www.globeandmail.com Canada-Globe and Mail www.chinadaily.com China-China Daily ME would search the table for 'www.globeandmail.com' and then type "Canada-Globe and Mail" into my webform. The table would be quite extensive with potentially hundreds of domain name/long form name entries. I'm not knowlegable enough about ME to know exactly how to do the table lookup thing. I'm guessing it could be a CASE statement: if domain name = "www.nytimes.com" then type text "US-New York Times" elseif domain name ="www.globeandmail.com" then type text "Canada-Globe and Mail" elseif domain name ="www.chinadaily.com" then type text "China-China Daily" That's just pseudocode and I haven't tried to implement it yet using ME because my hunch is that it may not be terribly efficient once there are hundreds of CASE statements to evaluate. I'm sure there's a better way of doing this and would welcome any suggestions. Hope I've made it a bit clearer... ;-)

Hi... I've been using Macro Express to automate some of my editing tasks, and I'd like your advice about whether it would be practical to use it in the following way. I'm running a news site. Each day I post links to 60-70 news items originating in any of hundreds of sources. I spend a lot of time entering and re-entering things like "US-New York Times", "China-China Daily", etc. Since there are so many sources, it doesn't make sense to write (or remember) so many individual shortkeys. It's occurred to me that, since I'm already using Macro Express to capture the URL for articles, I could construct a lookup table that would take something like... http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200507/s1405363.htm ...strip out the domain name... www.abc.net.au ...then look in a table for the "long form" name and type "Australia-ABC" into my edit window. So, my question is this: would Macro Express be able to do something like that reasonably quickly if the lookup table had, say, 300-400 entries? By "reasonably quickly" I mean in about the same time it might take me to type it out manually? Thanks for any thoughts you might like to share.

Ah, OK. I understand now. Thanks, Kevin.

Actually, I'm not quite there yet... ;-) When I use Mouse Click on Control and then specify X/Y coordinates under the Advanced tab, it's not moving the mouse to those coordinates. (The next command is Type Text, and it's doing so wherever the mouse pointer happens to be.) The control I'm using is the top-level browser window -- i.e., I run the Get Control utility,move the mouse pointer up to the window's top border, and then call that C1. Then I use the X/Y coordinates relative to that control's upper-left corner. Am I doing that correctly? On the other hand, this works... Mouse Move Relative to Control %C1%: 98, 352 Mouse Left Button Click Text Type: %T1% I'd rather do the first two commands in a single command (Mouse Click on Control) if I can, and I thought that what you were suggesting would let me do that. Cheers. M.