Cory

You know Terry I really am getting out of my depth here. There are a couple of corners I don't know much about in ME and this is one of them. I come from a background of the very early days of PC CADD (Drafting) and I can remember getting my first SVGA (800X600) 14" color monitor. When working on D sized drawings every pixel counted and although AutoCAD had onscreen menus we all turned them all off to maximize our editing space. So I learned to write scripts, commanded by typing left handed on the keyboard, and moused (digitizer) with my right, eyes never leaving the screen. Thousands of hours of this conditioning means as soon as I install a new application the first thing I do is figure out how to disable most, if not all, the damn toolbars. Think about it, most users aren’t even aware of what most of those buttons are and only use a couple like the Open button which can more easily be accomplished with a CTRL+O. To me they’re just a waste of space and time. Of course these days large displays are becoming so prevalent it’s becoming antiquated way of thinking but I still can’t see the efficiency of having to move the toolbars all the time when editing in Photoshop. I don’t ‘get’ the Floating Menus. Since I admonished Alexandra a little and no one else was chiming in I thought I should try to help and take it as an opportunity to learn a little about them since she was so pleasant about it. As far as I can tell there is no activation available and they’re designed to just run whenever ME runs. Also you can not use the Macro Run command to launch them. So to me they just appear to be disembodied toolbars of ME. Now I can see Alexandra’s frustration as I think she’s trying to do more that the original intent. Having said that it appears they can be manipulated to some extent. She wants them to be context sensitive which makes sense but since they run at startup and are always around the only way I could figure to make them work for me was to minimize and restore them with another macro since there is no activation. My advice to Alexandra and to you is to try something different. I think it would be much better to use popup menus instead. I do this for a few clients where the macros become too numerous to remember. I assign it to the middle mouse button and sometimes structure them in a hierarchy so they’re always a click or two at most away. But the important part is that once they’ve served their purpose they go away. It’s also nice that they popup where the mouse is already saving moves. And for Alexandra she can make the context sensitive so that if Outlook is on top it pops up the Outlook menu. Also in my popup I usually have the first macro in the list link to a web page defining all the macros and hotkeys for activation because you know we can never remember all that. But I have not spent a lot of time so I would love to hear Joe or Kevin’s thoughts on Floating Menus. If you want to try my sample macro without Outlook simply open it up and replace Outlook with Notepad. Also there is a tutorial in the sample macros you should take a look at. Hey, now that I look at it I see that they appear to have ‘launched’ a floating menu. Turns out they use Macro Enable to accomplish the task. Clever. That might work for Alexandra although it still seems it’s not intentioned to be turned on and off like this but rather something that stays up all the time. Also I don’t use ShortKeys much. It seems no matter how I try it always ends up conflicting with something else. Although using them like one uses AutoText in Word is helpful when not using Word but then again if you have Word why would you type in anything else? In fact I’m typing in word now. Well that’s long enough. I hope Joe has some time to comment. I might have this all wrong and I’m sure he could learn me a thing or three.

I was having troubles following your explanation and I don't have FireFox so I just tried to do one myself. See the attached file. There are 5 macros consisting of two floating menus, two menus for switching floating menus and one that composes a new mail message in Outlook. It's all very simple. The one menu if for Outlook and the other menu is for Calculator. Problem is it works just as I expected and I don't have any craziness. Perhaps you could look at my macro and see if there's something I'm not doing the way you like. BTW, the buttons in the floaters don't do anything. Floaters.mex

Oh, I see. You can't run Floating Menu macros from the Macro Run. Weird. Hmmm... I'll have to think on this.

I think there may be some subtle problem with your logic given the way you describe the focus loss. And I'm almost certain the Activation Caching would be causing the problem. You see when you call the new mail message macro ME will have seen the window title for Outlook and as soon as it's done running it will then fire the shower macro which, depending on how it specifically works, could cause it too loose focus because you are re-ordering windows. I'll have to make my own little sample macro and give it a try but i don't know if i will have time today. BTW, if you don't want to see the other toolbars why don't you simply close them when not needed instead of re-ordering?

Ah, I found it. This may not be relevant depending on your reply to my last message. This is an option in the cachine page. Here's a quote from the help file: If your problem is that the one macro is firing after the other is complete you can disable this option. But I’m not sure what you mean by “goin crazy” so I’m not sure if it applies. If this isn’t a solution please describe how it’s “goin crazy”.

Yeah that was a sleazy answer attempt wasn't it <g>. OK I’m reading your explanation again but now I see something funny where you say it’s going crazy. If you are running your macro to open OL and compose a new message the macro normally triggered by opening OL directly should not fire yet because, as you pointed out, we can only run one macro at a time. So is the problem that the macro you use to popup the OL floating macro is firing after the macro to create a new message? If so I may have an answer but I need to check to make sure I get my facts right.

Ahhhhhh.... Now I understand. And I have a possible solution. I too have macros that open up an email to compose to someone and although I use a hotkey the method it might interest you. Instead of switching to Outlook and going from there I launch the new message dialog from the command prompt. In the Program Path/Name box enter the OL executable EG, "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OUTLOOK.EXE" and in the Program Parameters box enter "/c ipm.note". This takes you directly to a compose note window bypassing Outlook. <LAUNCHDEL2:0:01C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OUTLOOK.EXE<PARAM>/c ipm.note>

Usually one can use a simple Text Type. For instance when filling out a form with states for shipping Montana is a pain fiven the nuimber of M states. Usually you can just type "Montana" or enough of it to be unique to get what you want. Also you can simply down arrow X number of times.

I rarely have problems between different computers assuming the applications are the same. Are you using the "Get Control Using Text" method? If not you might want to try that. Also does the client happen to have multiple windows with the same title? Are the windows titles the same as on your machine? This will definitely cause a problem. Finally ME does have some problems with the way it caches control handles so if neither of these work for you we might look there. Oh, wait. If you do have different windows titles you might need to modify the control which is easy enough to do at runtime.

Is it a timing issue? What type of clipboard operation are you doing? Can you post a simple example for me to try? Maybe make it a simple demonstration using notepad or something.

Wow, that's really complex. Personally I don't use floating macros so I'm afraid I'm not going to be much help there. Hopefully someone else can give you some better ideas. But I like you're thinking with switching depending on the application. I rarely get into making things like this but when I do I rather like to create toolbars with buttons in the application. To me it just seems to make more sense to use the application's toolbar instead of recreating the wheel. Also for things like starting a new mail message in Outlook I use the built in hotkeys like CTRL+SHIFT+M. Or I will use the built in VBA macros. If I get more time later I'll read your message again and see if I can follow what you're doing but the end of the year is near so there's not a lot of free time. And I'm sorry for the long winded post. You see I'm just lazy and it takes me twice as long to think of a concise response so I tend to ramble! Good luck!

It's good you have posted your problems here so the rest of us can be aware but you need to contact ISS and start a trouble ticket with support.

First off if you have a feature request you should submit it to ISS at the Features Request Form. Without end user requests they can't possibly think of every possible thing folks want so it's our responsibility to let them know. And let me assure you that ISS is not resting on their laurels. I believe that very soon many of these problems will be rectified. Also don't forget this forum is not run by ISS although many of their flks help out here. Secondly if you're just coming here to bash the product you're not likely to find many friends who are willing to help you find a solution. We try to be constructive and positive here and not adversarial. Having said that I think most will agree with me that there are many shortcomings to ME's activation, and window switching methods. It's just a suggestion but you might try a less condemning tone. And let me tell you I can understand how frustration can often get my goat as well. IOW I feel your pain. Now assuming you are interested in getting help with a solution I would like to offer some suggestions that I hope will help. Because I too often have to spend inordinate amounts of time finding a workaround. But before we go too far could you give some specific examples? Often people speak in generalities here and usually the fine details can often grossly effect how one would approach the problem. You speak of opening multiple windows to the same document which would obviously be a problem. But usually I find that if you launch a document, not the EXE, if open the application will switch to it instead of opening a new copy. What application are you having problems with and how are you launching it? ME can switch to applications and it does those like us humans do, by the applications window. I write a lot of macros and I usually don't have too much trouble switching to the window I desire. There are some cases like multiple windows with the same title that can cause problems but even then there are usually workarounds. Activation can be handled by a partial window title match like "Word - ". Of course if you need to switch to another open Word document you might need to do something more elaborate like Repeat With Windows to find a specific animal. But again, without a specific example it's hard to give any advice. So I agree that ME has shortcomings but I think if you give us a detailed description of a problem we can probably help you find a solution.

You can not use controls in a web browser to click hyperlinks. There are several ways to follow links in web pages with ME; you can use the "View Source" option to grab the raw HTML and divine, Tab X number of times thru the web document, or use the find utility. The later is best for people who are intimidated by the first suggestion and are trying to hit a moving target. Simply do a CTRL+F to find. Search for "Click Here", once and close the find and Tab followed by SHIFT+TAB. This will advance you one hyperlink and back you up one hyperlink. Now your hyperlink should be highlighted and all you have to do is Text Type "Enter". In case you were not aware one can tab thru the hyperlinks in a web browser. It's part of the requirements for Windows applications to always have a means of doing things if the mouse is not present. Of course not everything adheres to this standard... Shame really.

That sounds very strange. I thought the guy might have his caps lock on but that doesn't effect the output on my system. Can you make a simple test macro with sample data from a CSV file that types into Notepad to show us? You might want to start a support incident with Insight. BTW when filling forms I always use the clipboard option in the text type command. You might see if that fixes the guys wagon.

Bha! I haven't heard that one in a coon's age!

No, this is a fundamental limitation. The subject has been brought up here in the forum several times but there is no elegant means. You can try to somehow make a different window title. For instance write a macro to make the read only copy someplace on your temp folder and give it a different name. Or actually close the one window momentarily. But these are clunky at best. You can't even use controls effectively because they look for the window title first. In my experience I've always been able to find a way around it but it usually depends on some eccentricity of the program. Oh, here's one for you I used in Acrobat: Say you have two files c:\dir1\temp.pdf and c:\dir2\temp.pdf which both generate the same window title. The Activate Window will always take you to the first one in the process list. But if instead you Launch Program Only and put c:\dir2\temp.pdf in the Program Name box Acrobat will fire, realize you already have it open, and activate the second window. Many applications will do this sort of check when launching so this might be a workaround for you.

Floyd's right but I would go on to say that there is almost always a way to fedback data from the application and make decisions. But without knowing how the game works and what the interface it there could be a thousand and one ways to make that decision. And even the methods that will work often need to be considered carefully as to which would work best. It's like getting driving directions from LA to NY. You could take a northern path or a southern path. The southern path may be longer but if you don't have snow tires it might be a better bet tis time of year. TO do what you ask you need to become familiar with all the tools in the Macro Express toolbox and know how th egame works ot offer suggestions. So you need to either learn ME or pass along all the info about your application so one of us could make a suggestion. But there probably is a way as long as the game allows ME to work in it. One thing you might look at first is Get Pixel Color. I am not a gamer but it seems that due to interface limitations gamers often like to use this. You simply look at a particular pixel's color every second or so and when it changes you do something. Then look at the conditional features in ME. For instance in this case you would set the pixel color to an integer and test that IF N1 = 12345 then do something or Else.

Did you have admin privliges when you did the upgrade? Are you using Vista with UAC (User Account Control)? You may need to uninstall it completely if you did and reinstall using an admin acocunt. If an uninstal and reinstall doesn't work you should probably start a support incident with ISS. They're very responsive unlike many other software vendors.

Kevin is correct, you need to buy and install ME on the other machine. But beware that there are several pitfalls to running Macros on remote machines this way. In a nutshell if the RD window is minimized or disconnected all interaction with the remote GUI bits ceases. A workaround I often take is to have a windowed (not full screen) RD session, fire the macro, then open up other windows on my local system to do other things while it runs in the background.

In the sample macros and the ISS support website there's a tutorial on using Windows Controls using MS Calculator. Go do that and it will help you understand a lot. Controls are a bit difficult to understand at first but once you get into using them it opens up a lot of doors. I had forgotten that ACT can fire a program from a field. But i would suggest that instead of using a playable macro you instead use the MEPROC. Look under the help for the Command Line Parameters page and the third paragraph. In a nutshell you use MEPROC like you would launch a macro from the command line but without all the overhead of reloading Macro Express. In my opinion the best way to launch macros from other apps. As I see it you want to have launch a macro from ACT's utility and grab the contents of the field your in then take that and run with you macro to do the rest.

Actually..... If ME is successfully making changes to the MRUD then you do have access to the registry since everything ME does is with your account. If they block the use of regedit then simply use ME to edit those values.

Those are just MRUDs (Most recently used documents). Just because there is a file listed there it doesn’t mean it actually still exists. It’s just remembering recent file paths you have used. There may be a way to reset this list in ME but I am unaware of it. They are stored in the registry so yo could go in there an delete tehm if you need to. But there really is no need. As you open more files those will overwrite the old items in the MRUD list.

Thanks. It's always fun when one discovers new tricks. It's really slick with only one character but...

I found a cool way to count the number of occurrences of a certian string in a body of text. I used ot use a repeat but this works much better. Check it out.