WinAutomation Tutorials - 06. Macro Recorder

WinAutomation is a powerful automation tool that helps you automate any repetitive task on your computer. In this video, we shall explain how one can use the Macro Recorder to create a Job that will repeat all mouse moves and keystrokes in order to create an exact copy of the task that run during the recording, smartly recognizing each window each action is sent to.

---

Closed Caption:

In the previous videos
we learnt how to automate a 3rd party application
by sending mouse clicks and keystrokes.
mouse clicks and keystrokes.

This is a great method for short jobs
however,
when it comes to Jobs with several steps,
configuring this kind of actions one by one
may get tedious and burdensome.
In this video

we shall see how we can create a job that doesn’t need us to set the actions manually,

but rather records the actions while we are performing the task we want to reproduce.

This is done with the aid of a WinAutomation tool, called “Macro Recorder”

This tool can be accessed through the “Create New Job” dialog,
where we can choose to start building our new job using the macro recorder,
or we can find it within our Job Designer, under the tools menu,
or on the toolbar.

The Macro Recorder actually translates any sequence of mouse and keyboard events
into the corresponding actions;

therefore
it can be used to either build a Job from start to finish,
or to add a group of actions at any point within an existing job

We are already in the Job Designer,
so we’ll click on the Macro Recorder button on the toolbar to start our recording.

Before the actual recording starts
we have to configure some settings.
Most times we want to target our actions to a specific application.

By entering the application path here,
the desired application will be launched in both, during recording and playback.
In our example we’ll target MS Paint
and that’s what we are going to type here.

In most cases
we don’t need to record the full course of the mouse;
it is enough during replay to have our mouse jumping from point to point,
as this will also result to a more compact and fast executing Job.

But again, in our example we want to record each move of the mouse and we’ll check this option.

We want all mouse coordinates to be recorded and replayed relatively to our active window.
As we learnt in the previous video
this will ensure us that during the replay all mouse actions will be sent to the correct position,
even if the target window opens in a different location every time.

And last but not least,
we can see here the keys combination to be pressed in order to stop the recording after it has started.

We can also change the Stop Recording combination
if the pre-assigned hotkey is taken by a different application.

Let’s click here and start recording!

MS Paint opens and we draw a simple sketch...

So far we’ve only used the mouse,
now let’s write something to demonstrate keyboard recording.
We’ll type some keyboard shortcuts to change to the Text Tool…

we click on the point we want to place our text
and start typing.

Finally, we press Control+Alt+S to stop recording.

We are back to the Macro Recorder Settings window,
the only difference that this time we have to choose either to convert our recording to WinAutomation actions
or discard what we’ve recorded so far.

We choose “Convert”
and a dialog appears where we are prompted to select the playback speed.
The Macro Recorder has also kept track of the speed in which we have been moving our mouse as well as typing,
so we can select whether the recorded section will be replayed at the original speed,
at maximum speed
or anything in between.

Since we want to run this job at an average speed, we’ll move the pointer to the middle of the bar.

OK

We’re now in the Job Designer where we can see all the actions that our job consists of.
We could have obviously added and configured these actions manually
but that would be extremely time-consuming.

Scrolling through our workspace,
we can see all the actions used to create the job that will run,
recreating our exact mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes.

We can also see that our Recorder has smartly recognized when the active window changes during the recording
so that it inserts a “Wait for Window” action
to make sure that during playback the events will always be sent to the correct window.

Let’s run our Job now and see a genuine reproduction of our recording.

Excellent!
Check out our next videos for more…
Thank you for watching!