Cory

I was about to agree with you about the oversight but now I see what the problem is. This is funny, I've been working on computers my entire adult life and although I knew this many years ago I did not think of it again until now. Shift is not limited to the qwerty keypad, it works on the 10 keypad as well. So if you have the NumLock off and press 4 you arrow left. I now remember this in the days before our keyboards were 'enhanced' and got the arrow keys in between the two. I would leave the NumLock on and momentarily override it with a shift to arrow around or whatever. But unlike the qwerty shift doesn’t override the numlock the other way. Try this… If you have the NumLock off and ht the 8 it will arrow up. If you turn the numlock on and hit 8 it still arrows up! Now notice that there is no alternate function on your 10 keypad for 5. Also if you look at the Hotkey assignment dialog box you will notice the same thing. Regardless of whether your NulLock is on or off if you hit CTRL+SHIFT+Num4 it will always appear as Arrow Left. I imagine nothing in Windows or ME could override this as it’s what’s the keyboard is telling it. I think we tend to think as Shift as another key we can use in concert for more combinations but really CTRL+SHIFT+ANYTHING is really a two key combination. Shift just shifts the register in the keyboard to an alternate set of values. And in this case there is no value at 5.

I'm running IE7 on VU and I just went back 30 or so. Also tried it on a W2k machine and IE6 as well as a WS2003 all can go way back.

I've never seen this, could you give an example in the form of a multiple choice command where it doesn't work?

I seem to remember a place in the options of ME that controlled how the tray icon works but I can’t seem to find it now. Does anyone know what I’m talking about and where it is? My problem is a compatibility with a piece of timecard software called TCM. When you single left click the icon it pops up. But ME also acts as if it’s been clicked on and gives the user a password prompt. It only occurs when ME appears next to TCM but I can’t seem ot change how TCM is launched or the order of appearance of the icons. The best way I can describe it is that it seems like the single click is still going after the TCM icon vanishes and the ME icon falls under the click as well causing it to execute. I could hide the ME icon but then I run into problems with other apps. For some reason ME always wants to be to its left and I was thinking that if I could change the activation to be a doubleclick I might avoid the problem. It’s not an ME problem but I’m getting no love from TCM support so I’m looking for other options. Any thoughts?

I see where you're going. OK, a couple of limitations. With qualification ME needs to be running to launch macros on a schedule. Also ME needs to have an active session in order to run. IOW it can’t run as a service. And that session doesn’t need to be a console session. If you’re using ME for more administrative tasks and are not interacting with the GUI of an application it will run just fine in an RDP session or even a locked console session. So if you want to use ME you need to leave a user logged in. Now the qualification is that ME or MXEs can be run from the scheduler itself. This can be very handy, let me tell you. So before we go any further you have to ask yourself, “Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” Sorry, that always jumps to the front of my brain. I mean you have to ask yourself if you are willing to have an open session to let ME do its thing. I’m guessing you do if you’re considering it at all. Another handy thing is a little utility they have called MEProc. How it works is to have ME running but use the MEProc.exe to launch macros in ME without having to re-launch ME itself. I’m not sure how this would fit in for you but many find this very useful. If you’re just running a bunch of different scripts you can do that right from ME and you can use ME’s logic and such to control how and when these things. For instance you could have it check a folder for new files and if there are any do something with it. And let’s say you use part of the file name for something in the script. Well just stick a string var in the script and set that var using ME from within ME. For instance if it were a user account name you could parse that out and change something with the users permissions with a script. Personally I am not much of a scripter but I will raid one from someone else every once in a while or I might even use a good old batch file. How I do these using ME is to have ME look up something in the registry or wherever and come up with some vars and then contrsuct a batch file or script using ME and write it to disk. I then have ME run that scrtipt and delete it when it’s done. You can also redirect the output of the script to a results file you can suck into a ME var to check and see if it worked OK or log the results. For instance I just finished a surprisingly simple script for xcacls which modified NTFS permissions. Now xcacls can do everything from a command line using switches so I didn’t need to write it to a file to run but I did log the results to a file. What the macro did was to plow thu nearly 15,000 customer files explicitly setting additional permissions. This was real simple using a twice nested repeat with folder routine in ME. Simplified what I did was to fire the xcacls command using the folder name I got from one of the “repeat with Folder” commands to add a changing path. Each time it fired I waited for the log file to be ready, sucked it into ME, and checked that it succeeded. Once satisfied it logged the results to a file and moved to the next one. Even if I get failures I can later use that log file to make fixes. There are other guys here that do a lot more of that sort of stuff that could possibly give better advice on how best to do this but just know it can probably be done if you’re considering ME at all. But it sounds to me that if you’re thinking of creating ME macro files form a script you’re coming at it from the wrong end and need to take a look at how you can use variables to do what you need from one master macro file. Do you have any examples of a specific task you want to do?

I have no idea what you are trying to do but in my experience I've always been able to make ME do what I need by running it in the macro. IOW no having to create special macros for each case. It just sounds to me like you're not taking advantage of some of the programming and logic capabilities of ME and subsequently making life a lot more difficult than it has to be. You might consider sharing with us why you think you need to take this approach. Often I have found that when someone finds an apparent inadequacy in ME it's often because they are approaching the problem wrong to begin with.

I am running Vista and this does not happen. I think you may have some adware or something else going on with your machine. This is not normal Vista/ME behavior. Are you using IE7? How are your settings configured for opening new web pages, do they open in a new window or to a tab? Do you have tabbed browsing enabled even?

Anytime!

Really? Usually they are very good at responding. However I'll share some insight with you about Insight... If you use the form on their webpage it goes directly into a tracking system and these never go wrong or get lost. I've entered feature requests and bug reports some as long as a year ago that I had forgotten about that I will suddenly get an automated email from them stating that it has been implemented in the next version! I think email doesn't get the same regimented treatment and is susceptible to getting caught in spam filters and such so it’s much less reliable. The guys at Insight are very cool and very responsive and would never ignore your message on purpose. Just try them again.

It's real easy. Use the “Variable Set From File” command. In there check out the “Get File Path Info” section. In your example I would get Drive and path as T1 and T2 and then set variable T3 to “%T1%%T2%”. Sleazy!

Copy the clipboard text to a variable and use the Type Text command without the clipboard paste option. For instance Text Type "%T1%".

Buy Joe's book and check out the tutorials in help and on the support site. And if you run into a snag the forum is here for you.

Yes you can do this. The problem as you've observed is that you cannot run two macros at the same time so you need to be a little clever to run one macro, hand off to another macro, and return to the original macro. For these handoffs I save values in the registry. The trick is to structure your original macro to read these registry settings from the beginning and somehow jump to the position where you left off. For instance if you were doing an ASCII file process you can save the repeat instance in aregistry key and use as this starting position of the repeat command plus one.

Is this a web page or program? If is a web page I suggest doing a CTRL+F to find the text then do a TAB - Shift+TAB to move to the hyperlink. If it is a program it is likely the object you want to click on is a control so use the mouse left click on control command.

That's interesting, I've never noticed that before. There must be a technical reason for this. Does anyone know?

In cases like these I usually choose to read the entire text file into a text variable. I then get the position of the carriage return and line feed to copy part of the text variable to another texture of all much like the text file process does. Then I delete two characters, carriage return and line feed, from the beginning of the file and do it over again until the position equals zero meaning I've reached the end of the file. I save all the results of my logical massaging to other text variables and at the end of the macro commit them to files if need be. You're listening your dog install stop it

You should use the feature request form at Insight to let them know. It's in the support section.

Mine works in Vista Premium.

Absolutely. There are scads of us who write macros like this every day. One of the nice features of Macro Express is that with almost no learning one can start creating macros using the recorder. However as you may have experienced certain difficulties will arise. For this reason most of us who write macros frequently do not use the recorder it all and write all of our macros using the scripting editor which is more like a programming language. Here there is almost no problem that can’t be solved. I can say with confidence that Macro Express will do what you need.

Open the macro with the scripting editor and add a “Repeat Until” command and set the condition to “Until T1<>T1” which can only be true and will cause it to run forever.

So what's your question? Just kidding. I do this with many macros. Personally I find using a TAB to create a tab delimited file works great. I save them with the .tab extension and associate that with Excel. Works great.

I remember doing this a long time ago from the command prompt but I fail to find the command now. But a quick look online shows some utilities like DirDate which are command line driven. I would use somethign like this and put somethihg like "dirdate -CREATION date=12/25/2000 time=12:00:00 myfile.doc" in hte launch command.

In IE use F6. In the example you gave the number will be the last part of the URL so you don't need to check every character as wbeldman suggests.

It should work as you describe. Give us your code from the direct editor and let's see what's wrong.

What I do in cases like this is create my own registry keys to store things like this that vary from machine to machine. Create a second macro that sets the variables for the user then read them in you main macro. Simple! Alternatively if you can find a registry setting for the color you’re looking at try that. Run regmon and change the colors and see where it lives. Then you can read that in your macro. Another thing you can do for detecting changes is polling the screen. I just wrote a macro for a client that interfaces with a terminal emulator. We simply do a CTRL+A, CopyClip, Clipboard to string var, and then evaluate that string var for the existence of telltale text to know that we have made it. Just a thought.