Cory

Thank you

I don't know what you're trying to do, but you might also want to consider opening the web tables in Excel. Many times I see people go though all kinds of steps when one can simply link to the HTML tables in Excel. They're all part of the facility to link to external data and one can set the query to update with various rules like every time the Workbook is opened. Data tab in the ribbon, "Get Data", "From Web". You can navigate to the page, sometimes even password protected, and it will identify all the table and let you choose which you want to link to. So even if you're destination isn't Excel, it's easy to make a Workbook you can open with MEP that will result in a refresh of the data and everything in cells one can directly get with ease. BTW in Excel Use Ctrl+G to get to cells using the Windows Controls commands in MEP. You can also set up named references in Excel and they work in Go To. Like highlight the cell or cells you want and name them Fred. Now in Go To you can highlight that range of tables by putting "Fred" in the Reference field. Also consider if the data you are looking at is exportable in any way. In much of my scraping I will find the ability to export to a text delimited file like CSV. Even if one must do some math, or it's a huge data set, it's usually much easier to manage and the macros are more reliable. Sorry, I don't have much experience with mouse moves. I do this professionally and I just have always been able to find away without using the mouse in a web window. In fact I can't remember the last time I used a mouse move command in any macro. 🙂 Just a couple random ideas to consider. Sometimes it's more efficient to go around a mountain than over it.

I'm sorry I don't have much time here so I can't help you with your question directly. I wanted to give you some general advice. First is to do as few of things as possible with a mouse in web browsers. You can often grab text with a CTRL+A and then process that as text in MEP. Also I often find using the raw HTML more useful due to it's structure and labels of elements. Ctrl+U will do that in Chrome, I don't know about others. You can also navigate to a page's HTML by adding "view-source:" to the beginning of the URL. Also there's a command in MEP to get a page's contents. However this will often fail if using active web pages. Probably not a solution you were looking for, but you might consider this.

Ah ha! TLS as I suggested. Glad you found it.

There is no free version of MEP to my knowledge. Three is an evaluation period and am sure this would not be a limitation. There are help file entries for FTP. Are you certain the file is greater than zero bytes? What are your responses? You might have the permissions on the server to create, but oddly enough, not to modify. Have you tried passive mode? I tried mine but when I do I connect with a 220 but then all commands responses are an invalid handle. FTP sites have MANY different flavors and parameters. One needs to figure out what the server expects and emulate it. One big one is the TLS (encryption) scheme, which I don't see any settings for in MEP. It might be a "FTP Site" command to set that up after the initial connection.

There are dozens of ways user settings or environment can cause what you describe. Please don't be insulted but your message is like you calling an auto mechanic and asking what's wrong with you car with the only symptom being "it runs rough". 😁 There are many tricks like I used to automate the distribution of setting config files to all my users and they all worked off the same one. Some displays are at different resolution making the mouse moves WAY off target. Or one user auto-hiding their ribbon in Excel. There are some tricks like I always avoid mouse moves. I try to all of it with keyboard, even in web browsers. Home, a series of tabs, and so forth. But that's just one of many ways. And if you already use only keystrokes, then mouse move, ribbon states, and screen resolution will not be a factor. Also timing and flow control. I have no idea what you have implemented, but it becomes much more important in a multi-user environment. Some systems are more responsive, or as Samrae said Internet bandwidth or latency can be a problem if you're using a web browser.

Good to know. I will add that there's this thing with Windows since version 7 with it being clever and doing a shell game with the actual IDs. It keeps trying to guess where you are positioning it. Like if you swapped cables and it wakes up it tries to correct. It is maddening, because once it gets it swapped. despite what "number" the display shows, it's hard to get them straight again. Regardless, the mouse locator should answer any question. At least that's what I used to do. So is it a bug not being able to enter a negative number as the OP says? I don't have time to test it. Maybe you could try. Also OP what version are you running?

It was my understanding there were no negative values. The screen number might be out of order if they are physically transposed. I think to get to the next screen, you need to go greater than the width of your primary display. Launch the mouse locator and move around where you want it to go and see what the value is.

Oh, and the parts you have highlighted are the variables. Again, something one most frequently does from a dialog command. But if you look at the Variables section of the help file, it's explained. Also the "CB" is whatever name you give the variable one major difference form ME3 and ME4 was that instead of having a few pre-programmed variables, one now can declare one's own variable with a meaningful name.

I don't understand your message. What symbols are you referring to? Bob I was wondering if you might have the direct editor view mode enabled. Most of use don't involve ourselves with the actual code, we mostly use the dialog based method of creating commands and don't know what most of the codes are they generate. In the Script Editor go into the View menu and makes sure you don't have the Direct Editor enabled. If that isn't what you need, please elaborate.

It doesn't help with annotation, but the help file should have most of what you need. You should report broken links to ISS. I don't think "Step by step instructions"? is intended to be a link. It's the title of the box with the step-by-step instructions.

You're welcome.

I'm on vacation so I don't have time to look more but I'll toss out what came to mind. Whenever I've had trouble finding a way to schedule something in MEP, I've often found that I could do more with the windows scheduler from which, you can run a macro. I did make a series of tones for an alert like you are describing once. It was a long time ago and I can't remember how I implemented it, probably command line batch file, but it used MIDI tones. Sorry I don't have more to offer you now.

Your problem text contains a lot of extended features of RTF. I'm guessing you pasted this in from some other app which is including them not becasue it's necessary, but by default. I'm guessing that some of these things I don't often see like semicolons, curly braces are being seen a a Macro command component. You see when that run in macro command does that, it takes all the 'direct editor' code, including yoru text, and reinterprets the whole thing. I would edit out all those things so it looks like normal simple RTF. Also you could/should use the text type command to create the RTF. Why are you using Run Macro in Variable instead of Macro Run? It's rare that is ever needed and Macro Run wouldn't have this problem. And most times I've seen people who think they need the Macro Run in Variable, don't. My first thing woudl be to not use Macro Run in Variable. Tell us why you are using it instead of Macro Run and I bet I can find a better way for you using Macro Run. Second woudl be to remove all superfluous code in the RTF as I described in the first paragraph.

I don't have any great advice for you, all I can do is share. I started using MEP a lot when I was the "IT Guy" for a small financial company. I started maintaining systems but when I showed them how much labor I could save them, I needed up spending most of my time doing projects, like a paperless conversion project driven by MEP, or writing macros to improve employee performance and increasing data integrity. Since I was an independent contractor, I started doing automation macros for other companies. Many I met here. There's even a testimonial of mine on the macros.com website about the big hospital back in Bridgeport I did a lot of work for. So I was making great bucks and was my own boss and had no skills at programming. Eventually I became increasingly frustrated with MEP becasue although it's a great program for automation operations for a user and WinForm programs, it's poor at web automation. This is when I decided to teach myself VB.NET and started making web scrapers and other automation tools with it. Been doing that for 11 years now and I only rarely use MEP. I don't have a clue what to tell you to do in your case. I'd be inclined to pitch my macros to them and hope they see how it could make them more money. Maybe they could create a new position for you as a macro writer. Or maybe become a contractor for them and do your own thing. BTW, being self-employed is not all a bed of roses and is not for everyone. But if you're independent, you could culture other clients. Feel free to PM me if you would like to chat more about this. I don't want to share too many personal details in a public forum.

You're welcome.

You're on the right track. Many people start with recording mouse movements and such, but it's better to write it from scratch and use as many keyboard shortcuts as possible. Text Type command under Keyboard is what to use. Most keystrokes are simply a matter of entering them in the script, but some are "chords" where multiple are done at once. Having said that, the alternate mode keys actually modify what is sent to the PC. For ones like Ctrl+S it is as simple as putting those in there. MEP is smart enough to know to essentially hold the ctrl key <CONTROL> down for yoru next keystroke. But if you ever need to do multiple keystroked modified, you need to use the <CTRLD><CTRLU> around those keys.

Sorry. I'll bow out.

You shoudl be able to find your program in it's folder in the Program Files folder. MEP had had a problem in the past seeing some processes. If you can't see it as acantor suggested, use the Task Manager. In the Details tab scroll down to your program. You will see it's name. Right click and choose "Open file location". You can also use utilities like Process Explorer.

It's very rare to see a directory path as a parameter. I think you need tp have that in the Program/Path name. EG C:\Program Files\DVDVideoSoft\Free Video Flip and Rotate\FREEVIDEOFLIP ANDROTATE. EXE

I don't have time to try this but I might have an idea. But it is a kluge. Open a Notepad with a unique window title and have the macro paste whatever options. Macro terminates. Have a second macro that is scoped to that window and takes and activation of left mouse click. When the mouse is clicked, get the mouse position. Then you could evaluate the mouse Y position to see which item they selected. Or I could write you a little program 🙂

MEP has no means of designing forms like you're wanting. Floyd long ago wrote this instructional on how to use an HTA to do something similar. HTAs (HTML Application) are essentially active web pages that run scripts. I have made small simple programs to be a form for MEP. It takes only a few minutes in .NET. I had an idea once on creating a program that would take input from MEP that would make a custom arrangement of some simply controls like text boxes, buttons, and the like. There was no interest expressed so I never pursued it.

Are there WinForm controls in the form? If you don't know open the Get Control command. With your form (program window) visible, click the Launch Utility button. Hover over the fields and see it they highlight. If they do, I highly recommend using the Windows Controls commands in MEP. If not I had another thought. Are there any visual cues that could be used for timing? With controls we have the Wait For Control... commands, but we can also use other visual cues. Like sometimes a change of color on a progress indicator. Do you see anything different while it's busy and not accepting input?

Thank you for starting a new post. I would break the Text Type command into several. Create a integer variable and insert that between each. Before or after the tabs. Or you could loop the number of times and have a pointer you increment in the loop to the strings in yoru array. Type a string[1], tab, pause, Type a string[2], tab, pause, and so on. In addition it's sometimes better to use the clipboard paste option in Text Type. It depends on the application. In some it works great, others get upset.

One can't type an actual tab in most MEP commands or dialogs, but they can be pasted in and exist as I pointed out in my link, so if there is an actual 0x09 coded character, I think MEP will type it with the Text Type command.