MAKE MINE MACRO

Dick Pountain (16/11/1999 3:30pm): Idealog 64

It's been one of those weeks that makes one understand why so many people believe computers are the work of Satan,(indeed, my only real disagreement with them is that I don't believe in Satan.) However as is so often the case, a series of mishaps ended up doing me a favour by forcing me to do the right thing.

It all started when the Wacom graphics tablet I use instead of a mouse went wrong for no detectable reason. I hadn't installed any new software or altered my configuration in any way, but the pen reversed its button actions spontaneously and ceased to produce a single left-click when touched on the tablet. Reinstalling the driver software didn't cure it, but moving the hardware across to my laptop proved that was working just fine. Having failed to find anything wrong in Control Panel|System|Devices, I concluded the solution was to upgrade to the latest driver (one I had previously failed to install because it caused a GPF during bootup). This time the driver installed OK and restored the tablet to proper functioning. That's when my address database stopped working.

I've been using Blackwell's Idealist to store addresses for many years (for the simple reason that I've never found any substitute that I can live with) but now it just refused to function, corrupting its indexes and then claiming not to be able to find or open the database. Reinstalling and rebuilding the database did not help either: Idealist was deeply unhappy with something in my system, and it didn't take Sherlock Holmes to suspect that Wacom driver. However I was not about to abandon the new driver and my tablet, so I decided this was a message from the dark side that it was time to change my database.

What to change to though? I can't stand Outlook, with its overcomplicated interface and hideous record screen layouts. That left Palm Desktop as the obvious choice, because I already export my Idealist addresses into it anyway (automatically of course) to keep my Pilot up to date. Throwing out Idealist would simplify life enormously by leaving me with a single address database. The problem is though that Palm Desktop doesn't do certain things that I deem absolutely essential: in particular I demand the ability to keep an arbitrary number of different phone numbers in any record (each tagged with my own note to say what it is, rather than some rigid, predefined field name) and to be able to auto-dial any one of these with just a single click. Palm Desktop does have an auto-dial command <Ctrl>-I, but that will only dial the first of five possible numbers, and it won't dial at all if you've appended text to the number field.

Then my mind flitted back to a shareware macro recorder I had recently downloaded from the Web, but had rejected because it looked too ugly (and yes, I am that shallow). It's called Macro Express from Insight Software (www.macros.com) and upon reinstalling it I discovered it was still just as ugly, with the vilest toolbar icons I've ever seen. However this time I checked out what it can do and was very, very impressed. It allows you to make any macro global or associate it only with a particular program or window; you can activate macros via control keystroke combinations, the appearance of a text string or window title, on a timer schedule, mouse clicks on specified screen areas, pop-up menus and more. Most impressive of all though is the set of primitive operations that Macro Express supports, including all the Windows file operations, mapping network drives, sending emails or FTPing files, and multimedia operations like playing a CD or an AVI file. It supports variables, loops and conditional statements too, and can even read the contents of a text file into a macro: lots of things that I might have once used Visual Basic for are now much quicker as macros.

It took me about 5 minutes to create a macro that grabs a selected phone number from Palm Desktop, launches the Windows Dialler and stuffs the number into it. I then assigned this macro to be activated by a left-click on the title bar of Palm Desktop's Edit Address window: mission accomplished. Thus emboldened I replaced my text-editing macros - that I used to run in the ancient Windows Recorder - with some Macro Express equivalents which work just as well and have the immeasurable advantage of being both readable and editable. I had almost forgotten how downright empowering it is to have a fully functional macro facility available, something I haven't really had since DOS days. I've already started writing macros for the SGML editor that I use to author a dictionary: for example I've put a complex sequence of keystrokes to change the category of an entry to mark it as finished, remove it from a search list, then move on to the next entry, into a single keystroke. I would often get confused when repeating this tedious sequence many times a day, resulting in some entries being not marked as done, but now that never happens.

I've said it here before I know, but I'll say it again: of all the egregious errors that Microsoft has made in the design of Windows, the worst was the decision to put macros *inside* applications like Word and Excel, hence abandoning global macros that might work with other companies' products too. The proper interface into ActiveX, COM, OLE (or whatever it is called this week)should have been an industrial-strength, external macro engine running VBA.