Cory

Yeah the arrangement of the categories is mostly good but sometimes I find the arrangement 'hides' some things. Like the Text Type option to push to a control can not be found anywhere in the controls section and yet it’s one of the most useful commands you could categorize as control. I think we have all had a period of discovery where we get into the scripting aspect of ME and it takes a while to familiarize oneself with all the commands. If you haven’t already check out Joe’s book. It does a pretty good job of it.

I don't understand what you are saying. The first sentence could be taken a couple of different ways. Could you elaborate? Are you taking about keys used to activate a macro?

Sure you can. At least if I understand you correctly. I didn’t follow your explanation completely but you can use ME’s various window manipulation commands to do these things. For instance when ME runs you could have it save the name of the top most (focused) window to a variable that you can then use to minimize or what have you and later reactivate. Check out the commands Variable Set String > Set Value to Topmost Window Title and all of the Windows Programs category. Also I would like to suggest that you leave ME running all the time with all your macros in there instead of storing them in MXE files. I was tempted for a while to save things in individual files but later realized life was much easier if I kept them all organized in one file which was forever active. To launch them from a command line you can use the MEProc.exe but I think one might also be able to use API calls. I’m not a programmer but I know other people here could probably elaborate on that.

There should be more files than that in there. I have 23 files in my ME folder and you would need at least MacExp.exe in order to run. It sounds like ME is installed in another location on that machine. Just the three files sounds like an old instance that wasn't uninstalled completely. Look to see where that user's shortcut points to in order to find the real install location. I'm pretty sure you need to be an administrator on that machine to install ME or any other program of substance. First make your local user account admin before doing anything else. Control Panel > Users… In my experience as an admin I found it very difficult to have users in Windows 2000 or XP be anything but admins on their local machine account, even if they’re every day users. Vista is a lot better this way. But to answer your question the install shield does give you the option to install ME wherever you like. It just suggests that default folder under program files. You can browse to wherever you like. However it’s not just 3 files.

Just create another macro with a single command Macro Disable and point that to your macro. To keep from writing two macros you could add an If condition and an Else like below. This way no matter the state it will toggle it on or off and let you know which way. If Macro "Run Macro Express Editor" Enabled Macro Disable: Run Macro Express Editor Text Box Display: Enable/Disable Else Macro Enable: Run Macro Express Editor Text Box Display: Enable/Disable End If <IFOTH:17:1:Run Macro Express Editor><MACDEACT2:Run Macro Express Editor><TBOX4:T:2:CenterCenter000278000200:002:Enable/DisableMacro X has been Disabled><ELSE><MACACT2:Run Macro Express Editor><TBOX4:T:2:CenterCenter000278000200:002:Enable/DisableMacro X has been enabled><ENDIF> Fair warning: If more than one user is using this macro it will disable it for all of them.

You must have somethign running on your system like adware that's slowing it down. I just did it myself with several other apps already loaded and without the ME editor open and the hotkey sequence fires up the editor in about.... mmmm.... I'm guessing a third of a second. Compared to launching other apps that are icons in my system tray like WLM (Windows Live Messenger)ME is only slightly slower. I'm guessing WLM takes about thalf that time. I know it's no solution, I just wanted to let you know that it's not slow on all machines and that it might be an issue with somethign on your machine as opposed to ME. FYI I'm running Vista on this machine but I also edit on older Windows 2000 machines, XP, and Server 2003. Although I haven't tried them just now I've never noticed any lag in opening the editor. Maybe something with the sync settings could slow it down? But I'm using sync so I would expect if anythign that would make it slower.

I can't think of anything. I mean if you want to activate the macro to run automatically it would be kind of hard to do that without some sort of event. IOW until ME can read minds how would it know the users intent. I think you would need to have the user activate with a hotkey or something since you can’t intercept a mouse click on the close button. Maybe if there was some dialog box that popped up you could activate off a control in there. For instance if a confirmation screen like “Are you sure you want to save your changes?” pops up when they go to close you could use that but otherwise I think you will need to have the user activate.

Oh, to help your search the problem had to do with mail message windows in Outlook.

I don’t have time to play with your code and don’t have much time in general today but I thought I would toss something out here. Beware of a little problem ME has with controls. It caches control handles so often you can run into problem with windows with same names and similar index structures. A while back I had a big long post regarding the matter and at the end I posted a fix. I don’t remember what it was now off the top of my head but if you dig thru my old posts you will find it. This may solve your problem.

"He shoots, he scores!" Perfect Paul. Exactly what I was suggesting.

I’m sure there’s a more elegant way using some scripting but one sleazy solution might be to enable the full path in Windows Explorer. That is have Windows Explorer display the full path in the address bar. Personally I don’t understand why this isn’t done by default but that’s just me. Anyway you could have ME grab the path from the address bar and use that for your basis. As for WP I don’t know if I uses the standard Windows ‘open’ dialog box but if it does you could employ a trick I’ve used in the past. I once wrote a macro that disposed of a PDF file based on user info. It worked fine if they browsed to it but that was a pain and often they already had it open. So I had ME sense if Acrobat had a file open and if it did I had ME jump thru the hoops of doing a “File Saveas” to get the dialog box up. Once the dialog box was up I could grab the path and file name using Windows controls. With Word you can get this from the file properties but in Acrobat there was no such way. WP might have something similar so you might check there. Also many applications will cache their current working directory in the registry someplace. Find it and you could set your dir from it.

Yeah, that's the metadata that you can find in the document properties then. In Word, for instance, if you open the doc and go File > Properties I think you will see the same thing. There are indexing tools like Google Desktop and crawler apps that will look into each of your documents and record all that data in a Db or whatever. Als search indexers like Microsofts Index Service on Windows Server will collect all these so you can search from and Windows machine on the network. However I don't know exactly what you are trying to do so I don't know if this will work for you. But you might look for a metadata crawler that could create an index for you. But if you wanted you could use ME as a crawler. I think it would be fairly straight forward to show ME a directory and do a Repeat With Folder whihc could optionally include subfolders, that would find any and all files wiht teh DOC extension. When it found one it could launch the document in Word and blast down into the properties section and look for, record, or whatever yuou want to do with the keywords. I think it would be fairly simple to do but you would have to put up with ME opening and closing a bunch of Word docs. BTW, the keywords appear to be plain text in the document. One might be able to figure out how to find the keywods section in the document and have ME act on it. Or you can search it too. What exactly are you trying to do?

I'm sorry, I should explain something. When we communicate here we often copyclip commands from the macro and paste them in here. The intention is that you copy the part in the code section and paste it into your scripting editor. It's a quick and dirty way to share a couple of commands. In the scripting editor one can copy the commands or one can right click and copy the command text. In ME what looks like: Repeat Start (Repeat 8 times) Text Type: <TAB> > Repeat End isnt' enough because most of the important info is hidden. If you click on the Direct Editor in ME you will find that to ME it actually looks like this: <REP3:01:000001:000001:00008:0:01:><TEXTTYPE:<TAB> >><ENDREP> However most of us can't read this at all hence the Scripting editor we actually work in. Anyway we use the crazy looking stuff from the direct editor to pass things back and forth. If you paste in the bit above you will see the command and understand what's going on. All of the bits seperated by colons are different parameters. FOr instance I wanted it to repeat 8 times starting at 1 in increments of 1. However I'm not sure which 1 is which in this case. <g>

Personally I almost never use the recorder anymore. In the beginning it was OK but with about 5 minutes of looking at the Text Type command you will realize it's just as easy to enter them from the scripting editor. Especially if you consider the times when later you have to come in and modify it. Oh, and I don't know about you but I often muff it when I'm doing the recorder and tab too many times or whatever. For me it's easier to have a notepad nearby and make little notes like "t -> 9" and so on as my own recorder. If you open the Text Type command you can put any number of tabs in there and it will appear as one line. <TEXTTYPE:<TAB><TAB><TAB><TAB><TAB><TAB><TAB><TAB> > However I often find it useful to use a repeat instead. Especially when you have 27 tabs. You see one day you might need to change them or will be debugging and have to count them all which is a pain. It’s easier to have a repeat with X number of iterations with a singe tab inside. This way it’s easy to keep count and vary it if need be. <REP3:01:000001:000001:00008:0:01:><TEXTTYPE:<TAB> ><ENDREP>

It’s hard to fathom exactly what your workflow is and therefore it is difficult ot make suggestions. You see one little tidbit of info on how things are can radically change how one would best approach a macro. However I am fairly certain that you can use ME to ease your workload but I would need to know more specifics to be able to give you the best advice. One question that comes up is about the PDF files you are searching. Are you saying that if you use CTRL+F you can’t find any matches? Maybe the PDF files are scans and therefore raster images instead of text. This would make a big difference in how we might be able to employ ME. Are the websites the same all the time? What criteria do you use to look up these PDFs? Personally I would try to avoid using Excel at the time when you are browsing. Instead I would have it create a tab delimited file of the results of my labor that I would open with Excel later. You could have ME open the web pages and enter the search criteria as long as it follows some definable procedure. I’ve had a lot of experience using ME to do this and it can be made to work surprisingly well. Usually however the best you can hope for is a semi-automatic process when the user and ME work together. For instance I have a scanning macro when users scan in huge amounts of data and use a macro to file them. ME can’t tell from the scanned image who the person is, what the SSN is and all that so ME monitors a folder and when it sees a new one opens it for the user and prompts them to gather info then updates all the meta data in the PDF and saves it according to a complex filing scheme on the server. So even though it can’t ‘read’ the file it can still eliminate 80% of the work. I also have fax monitor macros that do similar things. So yes it can be done but I would need more info to even begin to fathom a macro design. Also if you contact me privately I would be happy to set up a phone call with you. Message boards are nice but a phone conversation in these cases is usually more efficient. Oh, you can also IM me.

Sure. Simply do the repeat with folder to return file a file name and test to see if it contains the string "*.tmp" or whatever. Simply do arepeat with folder and then use another string to accumulate the results. Just keep appending to the accumulator and at the end see if it contains *.tmp. Somehting like this: <REP3:07:000001:000001:0001:0:01:c:\><TMVAR2:08:02:01:000:000:><ENDREP><IFVAR2:1:02:7:.tmp><TBOX4:T:1:CenterCenter000278000200:000:ErrorDanger Will Robinson!><ENDIF>

Two things. First off depending on the type of application, ME might not work. There are many 'full screen' games like this whihc bonk into an alter mode when playing. If you can run the game as a windowed applicaton ME might work but if you can only run it in fulll screen it won't. Secondly too many people are making cheat-bots for games so I've heard that many of them have been taking measures to prohibit this and it seems reasonable that ME would be effected.

Sorry, I’ve been 86 for a while. I’ll definitely give you a ring when I go. My favorite cold war bomber the Valkyrie XB-70 is there and I simply must see it. It’s the last surviving example and an awesome sight. Like Kevin said you use the email send command. He suggests using the log but personally I don’t like it. I has several limitations I find too… limiting. For instance the log viewer apparently only works from within ME and only looks at the current maillog file which means if you want ot keep records of different batch mailing you have to play the shell game. I’ve been meaning ot see if there was a way around this but I haven’t had the chance. A couple of workaround are: 1. Create your own log file. I just wrote a mass email macro for users and it takes all the variables used in the job and creates a tab delimited file of the results. This is also useful for when it blows up and you need to figure out where it left off. 2. You can put your email address or other external address like a gmail account in the BCC field. This way you know it went. If you send it to yourself you can set up a rule in OL to move the file to a folder besides your inbox for safe keeping. To send a large email batch I use the ASCII file repeat command on a list of recipients. In Outlook I create a custom view so that contacts appear as a list instead of cards. I hate cards. Customize the view to show only the fields you’re interested in and copy it to your clipboard and paste it into a text file or Excel. When you paste it will be a tab separated values file (like CSV) that you can run ME on directly using ASCII File Process using the tab file option. Works friggin’ great!

I have seen this before but usually what I do is to simply check and see if a certian process like an IM app is running and warn the user to turn it off. But htere must be a way to disable the alerts. They must have some running process on teh computer you can exit.

CLEVELAND ROCKS! Or at least they say that on TV. I've never had the pleasure as I’ve never had a need. But I am itching for an excuse to visit the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB. I’m an air-fare war away from going just to see it but that’s a couple hundy miles from that keg, isn’t it? Yeah this subroutine simply generates the string. Look at the string var I reference in the registry command after selecting a coupe of files. It will look something like T4-“c:ducati.jpg;c:mv-agusta.jpg;cagiva.jpg”. That’s it, that’s the whole ‘trick’. So now you just put %T4% or whatever in the attachment section of the email command. I like sticking things I think might be used elsewhere into macro subroutines so I don’t have to try and extract them later and move all the vars around to get them to work in another macro. If you take the bit at the end about writing to the registry out and instead take the string variable out of there and put in the attachment section of the email command it will work flawlessly. I send out about 1300 emails just yesterday using it.

What’s it worth to you? If you like it you owe me a beer. This is a subroutine macro I created. It feeds back using the registry. <VARSR:01><CLEARVAR1:A:ALL><TBOX4:T:3:00LeftCenter000278000200:000:InstructionsBrowse to and select your files one at a time. When you are finished click on Cancel.><TVAR2:01:09:File to attach><REP3:08:000002:000001:0001:1:01:T1><TVAR2:02:09:File to attach><IFVAR2:1:02:1:><BREAK><ENDIF><TMVAR2:07:01:00:000:000:;%T2%><CLEARVAR1:T:2:2><ENDREP><REGWSTR:1:HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Insight Software Solutions\Macro Express\Miscellaneous\feedback><TBCLOSE:Instructions><VARSR:05>

Oh, here’s another idea. Most of the times when people are trying to do what you describe I have found that really they’re better off downloading the HTML file as a file. This way they can use variable commands to search, make decisions on and manipulate text. Believe me it’s WAY easier. If this could work for you could use a download manager like GetRight. I’m not sure but I think the chances are good that there’s a command line switch you could use have it download the HTML file for you. IOW have another application download the HTML file besides IE.

I don't think I have a satisfactory answer for you but I'll toss out some thoughts. You might look into VBA or VBScript. IE protects itself pretty well from script viruses so I’m doubtful you will find any Java to modify your browser interface. But since VBA in all other Office and MS apps I wouldn’t be surprised it one could do it this way. You might check out the –k command line switch. It starts IE in “Kiosk Mode”. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/154780 This will eliminate all menus and toolbars. I haven’t’ used it in years so I am unsure but it might be worth considering. You might check the registry for the keys that display the toolbars. If you could find the you could modify the reg settings for the macro run and put them back when you are done. You can install the RegMon utility to monitor the registry changes and capture the changes manually. Write a macro to blast into the menu and turn them off. Only usable if you’re doing batches. Finally remove the toolbars. Who needs them! Every time I’ve challenged a user as to why they have the Google toolbar they really can’t substantiate it. IE7 has a search field built in now for all and multiple search engines so they really don’t server a purpose anymore except to make the available display space less. I know, there are some users who find them useful but the majority of the people I know have no need for them. OK, that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. Good luck!

Not yet. Supposedly a fix is comming. Click here for a recent post asking the same thing.

If you are using IE you can use the "Wait For Webpage" timing control. I use it all the time and it works reliably. Also you can set a control for the status bar or other control in the web browser. Then you can use the Wait for Control command. This is handy for FF or other browsers. Most have a "Done" or somethign at the bottom that doesn't become active until the page has loaded. I once wrote a macro to download 30k+ posts from a Yahoo group. I found that I could simply Wait for Webpage then text type a CRTL+S and choose to save as HTML only as a way of generating text files. Worked really well. If anythign wasn't finished loading IE would 'hear' the CTRL+F but wouldn't give me the saveas dialog until the page finished. As a double check I had ME read the entire HTML file into a text var afterwards to ensure certian bits of key text was within before proceeding. You see Yahoo would give you these "Click to continue" avertisements at random intervals and if this was the case I would have ME repeat the last itteration. Worked flawlessly.