margaret

I have written macros for indexers, to copy terms out of a PDF into an indexing program. Usually either they work, or they don't, for a variety of reasons, all of which I have been able to decipher in the past. But now one person is saying that some macros work and some don't. What could account for this? It seemed to happen after she installed some sort of Windows update, but I don't know how a Windows update would product such a result. Thanks, Margaret

I have never used the debug features in Macro Express. Usually I just run the macro and try to figure out the problem myself. Now I'm having a weird problem but I don't seem to be able to use the debug features properly. I followed instructions in the book Macro Express Explained, but I still did not get anything in the debug window. What's happening is that the macro is eliminating one character from some text. I don't know how this is happening. I have never seen this before. Anyway, what is the secret to debugging??? Why can't I see anything in the debug window?

I don't know why partial titles wouldn't work for you, but I use partial window titles in my macros all the time and have never had a problem with it.

If I understand what you're doing, I think you could do "if b2 is not equal to T2...." Otherwise, to compare a variable to an earlier version of itself, I think you'd have to save the earlier version to another variable and then compare that: "if T2 is not equal to T3..."

Thanks, I didn't think there was something like that. I might be able to do a menu of choices earlier in the macro, and then the result variable from that menu would govern what happens when the user presses Enter at the end; after the Enter keypress, I'd have "if variable blabla = such-and-such, then .... " etc. Actually that way I could have more options with what the macro does in general.

I'd like to be able to have a "wait" command that would do one thing if one key is pressed and a different thing if a different key is pressed (there would only be two keys possible, and they can't be alphanumeric because this is right after the uses enters some data -- like it could be Enter or Tab). I don't see anything like that, so I suspect it's not possible. Enter will produce an action in the program into which we're entering data (an action we want to produce), and Tab won't. Sort of a continue yes/no? thing. Or is there something I don't see that would be the equivalent of "if keypress equals..."? Thanks!

It was nothing like that. The problem wasn't in the macros, but in security settings in an application that the user was using.

That would defeat the whole purpose of having the variable editable in the dialog. Meanwhile I wrote to customer support and they told me there's no way to do what I wanted at this time; it's just the way that command works.

I have a macro that prompts the user with an already existing variable. OK, it does this fine, but the user doesn't like the fact that the string is highlighted in the dialog, and wants to know if I can get the macro to display the information unhighlighted so that he can go ahead and type without having to do anything to unhighlight the text so that he won't overwrite it. I'm not seeing anything about options like this, and I don't think I can send a keystroke to the dialog when the dialog opens but before the user does anything - right? Thanks.

I wrote a sequence in which the last two characters of a variable are tested to see if they are what they are supposed to be, and the user is warned if they are not. It worked, but what happens is that even if the variable is what it's supposed to be, you still see a flicker of the dialog that you would see if the test had failed. I've never had anything like this happen before. What could cause this? Thanks, Meg

Meanwhile, I just went about it a different way. If last digit of variable equals five Or If last digit of variable equals zero Else ----- warn the user that his input variable is not a multiple of five End If

I'm afraid this doesn't make sense to me. Isn't dividing by 5 and then multiplying by 5 the same thing as multiplying by 1?? 125 / 5 = 5. 5 x 5 = 125.

I want to test whether a number is a multiple of 5. Is there a way to test whether the result of a division is an even number? I've tried testing whether the last digit is a 0 or a 5 but so far it's not working. Thanks.

False alarm, folks -- after I finished my previous post, I thought: this makes absolutely no sense. How can Macro Express put something into a variable that wasn't there a second ago? What if the problem is somehow in the receiving program? I changed the macro so that it pastes the last string into Notepad. It came out fine. The program I'm pasting into has some autocomplete functions. After I turned that off, everything's working right again. (It still doesn't make sense how the autocomplete could add a character unpredictably, but as long as I know it's not Macro Express's fault, that's all I need for now.) Sorry to waste your time. Thanks, Meg

I'm having a problem with a macro in which, at the end of a series of string manipulations, the final resulting string is pasted into a program. The macro was working fine most of yesterday with many tests. Then suddenly it started adding an extra character to the final string that it pastes in. I put in dialog boxes to test the string throughout the macro (like the dialog tells me "T10 is now %T10%") and I can't find anywhere that this extraneous character shows up. When I test the string just before it's pasted in, it's correct!!! But when it's pasted in, the extra character appears (it is the same as another character in the string). The final string is in the format Smith, J. J. (2005) Last night I was getting Smmith, J. J. (2005) Now I'm getting Smith, J. J. ((2005) The final string is created by appending " (2005)" to "Smith, J. J.". So the extra character is a copy of the second character in one or the other of the last two strings. What the macro is doing is breaking up a long string of names from a bibliography into separate entries. This only happens with the last name in the string; the preceding names come out OK. But I've tested every step of the last loop without finding the problem. And my loops that break up and manipulate the other names don't manipulate the text of the names themselves, only the spaces, periods, and commas in order to calculate where one name ends and another begins, etc. Where do I look for the problem now??

I've written a set of macros that have worked fine and are being used by about seven people. Suddenly, for one user, the macros are not working at all. The user claims that nothing has changed. Is there any change a person might make to their operating system that could cause macros to stop working entirely? I realize this is vague, but where should I try to look for the problem? Rebooting her entire system didn't help. I can't reproduce the problem -- the user sent me the file she is working on (macros involve copying from one application to another) and I didn't have any trouble. I am not in the same geographic location as the user, so I can't try it on her system. Thanks.

When I export using "output macro information," in the resulting text file there are characters that look in my text editor like little black rectangles, and if I take the file into Word, they look like little outline boxes. What are these and what do they represent? Thanks.

I want to give the user a dialog box in which a field contains text that has come from a string variable that already existed in the macro, the user can edit that text in the dialog, and when the user clicks OK, the edited text becomes a new variable. I know how to make one where an initial variable is shown as a prompt, but not how to make one where the user can actually edit the content of the variable. For example, suppose I had in the original variable "Great Falls Montana" and the user is supposed to add characters to end up with "Great Falls, Montana, USA". Or, if I can't do this with a variable, could I do it with the clipboard? i.e., the user can edit the clipboard content? Thanks, Meg

Yes, I think that concept would work -- but it doesn't help in my situation. I cannot involve Word in this particular process; the combination of Word and the other programs just doesn't work, too many memory-hogging programs trying to hog the same memory. Even if I could, it might make the macro too slow because the only reason to dip into Word at all would be for the italics. I just made a different macro that will re-italicize the text after it comes out of the cleanup-variable process; in other words, the user chooses a different macro if they want the final text to be italicized. Thanks for the idea, though.

Yes, I know the italics are gone! That was my question, can we get around that? Obviously the answer is no. This is not a Word-to-Word or even Office-to-Office situation. The copy-from program and the copy-to program are entirely different (and neither is a Microsoft program). However, if I don't stuff the clipboard into a variable, the italics are kept, at least in this particular situation. Thanks.

I don't see what's funny about it. Just trying to do what the users need. What I was looking for was some way for the macro to set a flag if the text was italicized (an "IF" loop), so that it could be re-italicized later. Obviously, if the macro cannot recognize the italics in the first place, no such thing is possible; the target programs are never the same, and I have no idea what codes the copy-from program uses, though I do know the ones the copy-to program uses. So, the answer is NO. Essentially, the only way I can retain the italics is to simply paste the clipboard as is and not have the macro clean it up. Rats. Thanks for your reply.

Is it possible to have a macro "know" that text it copied is italicized, so that when it pastes the text somewhere else, it will still be italicized even though that text has been manipulated as a variable in between? In the macro, I put the copied text into a variable and then do various tests and manipulations to it before pasting the result into another program. As it stands, the text loses italics in the process. If the macro can determine that the text is italicized, I could set a flag in the beginning of the macro so that it could re-italicize it before pasting. Thanks.

Sorry, CANCEL THIS MESSAGE (I just realized that because of other things, the question is irrelevant). Is there a way to delete one's own post? Or I guess I should say, delete a thread one has started?

On a "floating menu", if you have macros on it that were originally designed to be program-specific, is there a way to put in a loop that will give an error message if the originally desired window is not running? It seems that if the program isn't running, and you click on one of the toolbar icons, nothing happens except that the toolbar title loses focus, but no error messages are produced. I tried if window not running, but nothing happened with that either.

I think maybe you meant MEPro in the last sentence -- the only way I can create a pop-up menu in ME3 is to give it a hot key (won't allow me to go further without specifying one), and the word "submenu" isn't even mentioned in "Macro Express Explained."