Posted: 11/2/2012 7:36:45 AM EDT
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Do any of you have experience with a program for automating tasks on a Windows computer? I've done some searching and even some evaluating of some of the freeware or free trial software out there, but the main stumbling block I'm having with anything I've tried is that the "macro recording" functions either don't work very well, or the scripting requires me to learn a new language to manually generate scripts. Before I take the plunge and purchase one of these, as well as spend the time learning their particular language, I wanted to see if I could get some recommendations here.
While I'm looking to mostly automate some reporting with Crystal OBDC, and there are some Crystal specific things out there, I can see uses for a more powerful/expansive solution. Ideally, it would have a GUI recording function that I could use to rough out a script that I would then manually text edit for reliability or efficiency to use as a crutch until I become more familiar with the scripting language. However a complete GUI system, which in order to automate would actually require mouse clicks and icons and windows to all populate identically to be interacted with, is worthless to me. |
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Autohotkey and AutoIt are the two freeware ones I'm looking at using. It doesn't have to be freeware though. This is for work, if someone is using something that's easier/better/faster than either of those, I'm willing to pay. |
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Authohotkey is great, I got to 60 on the boars in elwyn forest non stop. |
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I use the "task scheduler" to generate alot of automated reports every morning.
I have it open an excel file at 6:00 AM, which in turn automatically executes small macro that executes an extensive vba macro in another file. Works fine 98% of the time. The other 2% of the time just pisses me off to no end wondering why it didn't work. 
I don't know how crystal works, but I'm updating several access databases within my macros. It is pretty simple to set up. |
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Quoted:
I use the "task scheduler" to generate alot of automated reports every morning. I have it open an excel file at 6:00 AM, which in turn automatically executes small macro that executes an extensive vba macro in another file. Works fine 98% of the time. The other 2% of the time just pisses me off to no end wondering why it didn't work.
I don't know how crystal works, but I'm updating several access databases within my macros. It is pretty simple to set up. I think I could make task scheduler work. It would be more work inside crystal, which I can do fairly well. But I don't know if it could be used for more complicated tasks, i.e. At 1:00am run this report, export as .pdf to public folder \xxx, print exported .pdf at the Xerox in the main office, etc. |
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Quoted:
It's been a while since Crystal. But - IIRC you can pass Crystal options via the command line interface. So figure that out, and then simply schedule that task via windows task scheduler. Maybe? I will look into that. But really what I'm getting at, is my current need is to automate Crystal, which I can find simple or Crystal specific solutions for. However, with something like Autohotkey, then the sky is the limit. Now instead of just automated reporting, with a little work I could report, evaluate, execute this if the data is that, so on and so forth. And since I'm not in IT, and our IT dept is limited in resources, I'm looking for a 1 size fits most solution that will take me a reasonable amount of time to become proficient at using, in order to create more time in the future for my more pressing responsibilities by automating some simple but tedious tasks. |
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Quoted:
Quoted:
I use the "task scheduler" to generate alot of automated reports every morning. I have it open an excel file at 6:00 AM, which in turn automatically executes small macro that executes an extensive vba macro in another file. Works fine 98% of the time. The other 2% of the time just pisses me off to no end wondering why it didn't work.
I don't know how crystal works, but I'm updating several access databases within my macros. It is pretty simple to set up. I think I could make task scheduler work. It would be more work inside crystal, which I can do fairly well. But I don't know if it could be used for more complicated tasks, i.e. At 1:00am run this report, export as .pdf to public folder \xxx, print exported .pdf at the Xerox in the main office, etc. I do print an excel file to a PDF and publish it to a shared folder. I used to print paper copies every morning, but quit after I became the weak link about picking them up.
All of the extensive programming is in an excel macro. Task scheduler just opens the file and the macro executes immediately upon opening. |
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Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
I use the "task scheduler" to generate alot of automated reports every morning. I have it open an excel file at 6:00 AM, which in turn automatically executes small macro that executes an extensive vba macro in another file. Works fine 98% of the time. The other 2% of the time just pisses me off to no end wondering why it didn't work.
I don't know how crystal works, but I'm updating several access databases within my macros. It is pretty simple to set up. I think I could make task scheduler work. It would be more work inside crystal, which I can do fairly well. But I don't know if it could be used for more complicated tasks, i.e. At 1:00am run this report, export as .pdf to public folder \xxx, print exported .pdf at the Xerox in the main office, etc. I do print an excel file to a PDF and publish it to a shared folder. I used to print paper copies every morning, but quit after I became the weak link about picking them up.
All of the extensive programming is in an excel macro. Task scheduler just opens the file and the macro executes immediately upon opening. I had thought about using Crystal via scheduler to retrieve the data, export to excel and use excel macros to do what I want to do with that data, but I did not have an opportunity to try it this week. |