DaisyDuke

Thanks Malkey for your examples, I noticed though that $iWidth and $iHeight of the _WinAPI_DrawRect function are actually the bottom right x and y coords. Do you know how to make the rectangle (1st example) to stay on top of everything until the gui closes? The rectangle is drawn outside the gui. Cheers

you can achieve what you want, there are lots of examples to learn from, and yes script will run in background. Spend more time reading through the help file, cos auto-it is an amazing tool!

Use the autoit windows info to get the ID of the popup message box and the button to press then... look in the help file for WinActive and mouseclick. Goodluck

Thanks kyloma, I will try your advice, sure there will be something similar in excel VBA to do the same fileInUse check. this forum ROCKS! bye

Hi, this isn't probably the right place to ask but I found this community very helpful and full of awesome fellas, I am sure someone got round to my problem once in his life because it's a quite general file handling situation with excel. In few words, I have an autoit script that write some data in a text file at a random frequency and an excel file that repeatedly (every 4 seconds) load the data via the import external data query function. Sometimes the excel query stops reading the file, only reloading excel it gets back reading the file. So there is something that causes excel to lose its reference to the file. It could happen that excel reads the file at the same time of the function fileWriteToLine is executed. Also it accurs that the function FileCountLine executed before the writeToLine to get the last line to write to, gives me an error, probably because it reads the file while excel is already reading it. Well these are my thoughts, I am not an expert. So my question is: is there a way in both excel and autoit script to check if the file is available before reading or writing to it? I could sincronize the reading and writing with the system clock so they never coincide, but it seams an extreme solution and I don't know if it would solve the poblem. There could be a different way to pass the data to excel, someone could say why don't you write it directly onto the worksheet? well I managed to write only on the active worksheet, I need something to upload data in background so I can use and activate the other worksheets. I hate excel but it's quick for easy data analysis and graphs. Thanks for reading so far, any cool ideas?

Unfortunately OCR is a must as data is from flash apps.

Hi, I wrote a script that monitors a web page and acquires data via the tesseract OCR engine. As long as there are few lines of data to monitor I am happy to resize the browser window and put it in a corner of my desktop. But as the project goes on there are more data to monitor, therefore I will probably end up having half of my laptop screen occupied by the browser windows and it's likely I will not be able to do anything else with the laptop. So the only options that came to my mind are 1) to relegate one computer for the monitoring process itself, and do the other tasks (data analysis in my case) from another computer; 2) to extend my desktop area to an external monitor, so the window to be monitored stayes out of the way... Obviously the OCR engine as well other autoit functions (i.e. pixel checksum) work only on active windows, great would be to have the windows minimized, but I know that wouldn't work. Is there a way to do it with a virtual graphic card, or running the script in a virtual machine or something like that? Any other ideas? thanks

Local settings can be sincronized with a server in the network so that when you switch from one pc to the other your preferencies are loaded automatically. If your network is not under a server autoit can do the job but I fear you have to write the mouse movements coords and commands yourself, I am not aware of a -recording movement tool- .

To GrangMOJ, if u are parsing a tif image to tesseract, it has to be uncompressed. Try to use MS paint program to save to tif extension, it should work. And it doesn't work with WIN7! bye

I am moving on by trial and error, and I finished my bullets.. if anyone wants to experience this, create 2 excel file in your C drive called workbookA and workbookB, link cell A1 of workbook A to cell A1 of workbookB, then run the test script (see links) and ... why is workbookA not updating? https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_xHHdnkwPmPYmJlNTc1NzEtMmVkNy00ZDk3LWE1ZDctMDA5ZGM5MmJlZWRm https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_xHHdnkwPmPNzM0YmMyNTQtYTY0NC00MTdiLWJhNmEtYzMzZWM5OTIwOWRm

only one, woorbook B, the one where the script writes data to, the other one (A) I open it myself.

I'm still not focusing why the workbook A doesn't update it's linked cells to workbook B when the latter has been opened by the autoit script. And it works when I open it and manually type some data. I will write my data to a txt file instead and then import it in excel as a workaround to this matter, with autoupdating should work, finger crossed.

thanks Hannes, i'll give it a try but I have to change the workbook, i mean i have to go back and use a single workbook, because the calculate function upply to the workbook opened by the script (, and it doens't update the other workbook A. But it's a good hint, I'm glad. back soon with updates

Dear all, my first post! I am being using autoit for a while though being silent because I always found the answers to my question in the forum. But here I am stuck with a silly problem related with excel. There are 2 excel workbooks, lets call them A and B. Some cells in A are linked via formulas to cells in B. Thereafter as soon as I write manually in a cell in B it updates the linked cell in A. And here it's normal as it should be. The problem comes when my autoit script opens the workbook B and write to it, cells in A are not updated automatically even if the workbook B is saved after every data entry. It looks like the autoit script has priority on the workbook B. I would use a single workbook for my job, like using one sheet for automatic data entry by the autoit script, and a second sheet for calculation and analysis, but if I write to the calculation sheet the script will not write the data on the other one. You will probably think I have to specify who's handling the workbook or something like that. Well how do you do that? cheers to all