Cory

Ah, simple. Do atext type to Shift+Ctrl+Right_Arrow to highlight the entire word. Then cut it to your clipboard and copy only the first letter to the variable. Then just paste it back. These are fun ones. Text Type: <SHIFT><CONTROL><ARROW RIGHT><SHIFT><ARROW LEFT> Clipboard Cut Variable Set String %T1% from Clipboard Variable Modify String: Copy Part of %T1% to %T1% Variable Modify String: Save %T1% to Clipboard Clipboard Paste <TEXTTYPE:<SHIFT><CONTROL><ARROW RIGHT><SHIFT><ARROW LEFT>><CLIPT><TVAR2:01:03:><TMVAR2:10:01:01:001:001:><TMVAR2:16:01:00:000:000:><CLIPP>

There isn't anything specialized or different in what you are trying to do. Said another way it doesn’t matter if you’re polling quarterly reports online or playing online poker. All the problems and techniques discussed here apply equally to most everything. And often people start playing games and learn tricks that will allow then to do real productive things as well. If anything games are a good learning ground. My advice to newbs is that in the beginning recording keystrokes and mouse moves are fine but you will quickly run into problems as you try to get more sophisticated. For instance cyberchief was suggesting repeats which could be used in conjunction with your existing macros. But I’d like ot suggest you try writing your macros from scratch in the scripting editor. It seems daunting but it’s really easy to pick up. Go to Insights support page and there you will find all kinds of tutorials. Also there are some really good ones in the help file. And of course ME comes with a ‘samples’ file that is a must see. Also getting Joes book will help you a lot. To get started look at the ‘Internet” command category in the scripting editor. See how in there you can open web pages and such. Then the text type commands. Hint: Use tabs to highlight hyperlinks or fields in your browser. And when you get to to a sticky spot just ask us here!

Weird. I do the same thing and I can't get them to work in either. I'll have to look into this more later. After the races.

I'm glad you got it figured out!

FYI ME has a built in FTP client. This could avoid all these problems.

Day of Year It turns out I had already done most of the work already. Glad to get this done. Later I'll make a expanded version that will generate teh Excel integer dates from 1900 on. I often find that compairing and calculating text date are often a pain in the butt and this should make it a lot more easier.

I've been meaning to extract it from the other macro and clean it up. Hold on a sec and let me sort it out for you.

I would simply copy the time and parse it out for hourse, minutes and seconds. Do some integer calculations and make a variable for total number of seconds. Double that and use that in a delay command.

Please be more explicit on the type of error you are seeing. It makes a big difference on how to approach the problem. On of the shortcomings of ME is that it doesn’t have good error handling. So if a file fails to move, and email address is invalid, or what have you it doesn’t have and error recovery that you can use script logic against. That being said I’ve never had an ME error that I couldn’t use some ME cleverness to work around. Most require logging attempts at certain actions before then checking on restart if it failed or not and taking some action. However like I said before the way to approach this varies greatly depending on the type of error. Also about 50% of the errors can be avoided by writing some script that checks some things first. For instance if you have a huge list of email addressed write a simple macro that checks the validity of the email addresses first before running your main email macro.

As long as we're bing tidy you might want to use Break instead of Repeat Exit. It works in all types of repeats and I think Repeat Exit is just there for reverse compatibility.

I have run into some issues in Excel where I wanted the Excel integer date and I plan on witing a subroutine sometime soon to do this. But I do have a routine that calculates the day of the year which even accounts for leap years if you're interested. It's at home on my desktop machine which is currenlty off however.

The link still works for me. Basically all Joe is doing in that example is copying the number of lines in the text file and then settign a random number between 1 and the number of lines. I wasn't looking closely how he did it but I would rerun the repeat but where it asks which number to start at you could have it use this randome integer and process only one record.

I'm not 100% sure but I don't think ME has anyway to monitor and record the keyboard. I mean you can wait for a specific key to be entered but not any key and capture what that key was. There have been many times when I wanted a macro to watch teh keyboard waiting for the person to push any number of keys and then do differnt thigns based on which key it was but I don't think that's possible But it would be nice and I agree there should be a "Wait for Any Key" that would work like the "Wait for Key" but also record that key to a variable. If it does exist I would dearly like to know.

In cases like these I create an infinite loop and use other means to control the egress. At the end of the loop I owuld create an "If C5 Visible" conditon and inside that If-Endif section put a Break command.

Variable MOdify String > Option 2 tab > Save to Clipboard

For the life of me I can't understand what you're looking to do exactly. So with DA you type a simple bit of text and when it sees that it expands the text to a larger bit of text. Do I have this right so far? IOW it’s like Word’s AutoText feature. Now the first thing I don’t understand in your message is that the text generated in the second code box is missing the second line in the example of your first code box. Am I missing something here? But to answer your question “Yes” it is easy to position your cursor. But I don’t understand about you needing to count characters in order to know to backspace X number of times. Would it not be better to just not type the text in the first place? So I must be missing something here. Also between the two code sections you say the cursor will be positioned after the tab position of the second line. What tab?

Can't you use a popup or other macro and have it reactivate the window that it scared away?

works for me too

If the time exact time isn't hyper critical I will often just put a delay in my repeat loop and then vary the number of iterations. Or put some logical test within. So, say, repeat 120 times with a 10 second delay. In the end it will be a little more than 1200 seconds but often that isn't so important and it makes the macro a lot more simple.

You example only has files in one set, lower case a-z. In the ASCII set there are special charcters lik "[" that appear between a-z and A-Z. I'll write up a better example when I have more time. Mainly I want to know what the last character is. I'm thinking it might be "~". You know I was just checking somethign and realized I made an assumption I shouldn't have. I thought xcopy worked the same as the Windows Explorer. In Windows Explorer (like if you do a drag and drop) it copies in reverse order. But Windows Explorer in Vista copies in alphabetical order. I'll make som samples and write more later.

I use the find feature. IOW I do a CTRL+F for “Click here” then tab and shift tab to highlight the link. Alternatively if it’s a simple page without too many links and if it doesn’t change very often you can tab a certain number of times to highlight the link you want.

I just ran a couple of tests on Vista Ultimate on two different machines and could not replicate your complaint. So it's not inherent with Vista, it has to be environmental. Something is different on those machines. Are the websites secure? I know IE7 will open a separate window when in a different zone. For instance if you have a web page open that’s in the trusted sites list and open a page that is in the “Internet Zone” it will open to another page. Maybe one of the pages is a redirect. Give me the web address and let me try it on my machine. Does logmein work from a web portal?

All of these are NTFS examples. In my experiance when a user accidently drags and drops a folder somepleace else it moves the last files first followed by the last subfolders. Of course this is in Windows 2000 and XP. In Vista it's the other way around.

In W2k and XP wildcard file operations are done in reverse alphabetical order for normal characters a-z and 0-9. But special printable characters (limited to the set 32-126) act unpredictably. Can someone explain the rule to me? Please understand I am not talking about how things are displayed in an Explorer window. I know that starting in XP they got clever to give more intelligent sorts but that’s not what I’m looking for now. Having said that if anyone has a write up on the logic there I would love to see it. But for this question I’m talking about what happens when you do something like an XCOPY. Now I’m assuming that the order convention for a command prompt copy command is the same as it is for ME. If I got that wrong please let me know what the deal is. Also if my assumption is correct again please let me know. To elaborate on my question I always thought that if you did a copy command it did it in reverse ASCII order. But now I’m not so sure. Assuming the DIR command operates the same way this is not so. It appears that the special characters before 0-9 appear in order and the special characters after the lower case letters appear in their proper place but the special characters between the lower and upper case letters seem to fall someplace on the end. Huh? Now functionally I only need to know one thing to solve my problem at hand: What it the highest character in the valid file name set? IOW what can I name a file to ensure that a copy operation will try to act on it first prior to any other files in the folder? But my curiosity is piqued so I’d also really like to know what the overall story is here. Also it would be useful to know how this will work in Vista and or ME.

I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while but I’ve been busy. Today I was working on a similar issue so I thought I would post this for you. Vista users beware, the order of operations has switched on file operations. It used to be that, much to my annoyance, a wildcard copy command would start at the end of the alphabet and work backwards. Thankfully the corrected this in Vista and now it starts from the beginning and moves up the alphabet. But if any of your macros are sensitive to this it could conceivably cause problems for you. Just thought you would like to know. Hey Kevin: Have ME file operation commands always followed the OS or does it follow it's own logic? And if different waht is it? I'm too lazy to test it myself.