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What you want to do is often called "scripting" a series of programs, and
then "gluing" them together. So, where you read the word "script" or
"scripting" in the rest of my email, you can think of it as meaning
"automate" or "automating", which is what you want to do with the five
programs that you listed.
To "script" a series of programs and "glue" them together, I have always
used, and highly recommend, "Windows Script Host" (a.k.a.WSH) from
Microsoft, which is free and may already be installed on your computer. WSH
is a broad collection of scripting technologies, but you will only need to
focus on the "Wscript.Shell" object (which is a part of WSH) for automating
programs which weren't written a-priori to be "scriptable".
Of the five programs you listed, three of them (MS Excel, MS Access, and
Windows Explorer) already have built in support for being "scriptable"
(meaning that you don't need to use the "Wscript.Shell" object). The other
two (TS and EL Editor) may have built in support for being "scriptable", but
I haven't checked and so I don't know for sure. Not to worry though,
because Microsoft provides the "Wscript.Shell" object for just this purpose
which makes programs "scriptable" if they don't have built-in support for
being "scriptable".
You will also need to pick a "glue" language, which Microsoft also calls
"script engines". Microsoft provides two script engines as part of WSH
named VBScript and JavaScript, which you may already be familiar with. If
not, there are many other glue languages available that you may download
separately (unfortunately EL is not a script engine, but it wouldn't be
difficult for Omega Research to make it one if they chose too). I would
recommend using VBScript however, because there are lots of VBScript experts
around (probably quite a few on the omega-list and metastock lists, as well
as hundreds of other mailing lists and news groups), and there are lots of
examples written in VBScript.
There are two versions of WSH, named WSH 1.0 and WSH 2.0. WSH 2.0 is the
latest version of WSH as I write this, and I recommend upgrading to WSH 2.0
if you don't already have it installed (see the table below). WSH 2.0 is
compatible with all Microsoft 32-bit Windows operating systems, including
Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows ME, Windows 98 and Windows 95. Some of
these operating system ship with WSH (i.e. the newer operating systems)
while others do not, as follows:
Windows 2000: Ships with WSH 2.0 and the latest script engines.
Windows NT: Does not ship with WSH, although WSH 1.0 is available in the
Option Pack
Windows 98: Ships with WSH 1.0
Windows 95: Does not ship with any version WSH.
WSH 2.0 can be downloaded for free from Microsoft's web site and easily
installed. The main Microsoft scripting web site is
http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/, where you'll find all of the downloads
and a lot of other useful information as well.
There are lots of books about scripting, but the one I would recommend is
"Windows 2000: Windows Script Host" by Tim Hill from Macmillan Technical
Publishing (ISBN 1-57870-139-2). Although it has "Windows 2000" in the
title, it is really only a book about WSH 2.0 and VBScript, and so applies
to all of Microsoft's operating systems that have WSH 2.0 installed. You
will be most interested in Chapter 7, "Built-In WSH and VBScript Objects",
which talks about the Wscript.Shell object and has a simple example of
scripting a program that wasn't designed to be scriptable.
Regards, Matt
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ivo Karindi" <ivo@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "OmegaList (E-mail)" <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>; "Metastock List (E-mail)"
<metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2001 11:24 AM
Subject: Any software out there that would do my mouse-clicks for me?
> I'm wondering if anyone knows a nice little program that would enable
> automating a series of mouse-clicks, some data entry from the keyboard,
> highlighting / copying / pasting text, and other tasks in the Windows
> environment? I'd like to automate running many series of tests. The
thing
> would have to work with TS, EL Editor, MS Excel and Access, and Windows
> Explorer.
>
> Ivo
>
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