Moving up and down e-mail selections

andy t,

The WSR Toolkit manual on page 8 shows a screenshot of the "command macros" tab. From the looks of it, you don't need to use the "find a program" button to do what you want to do. Here are the steps to create a "go to top" command. (Note that the keystroke is Ctrl-Home, not Ctrl-Page Up.)

1. Leave "in the context of" set to Global so that you can use the command in any application, not just your mail program.

2. Type "go to top" into the When I Say box.

3. Set the "simulate key press" area to execute a CTRL-HOME keyboard shortcut and click Add to put it into the Command Sequence Viewer.

4. Click the "Create Macro with Command Sequence" button.

To create the command for "go to bottom," repeat the steps but use different wording for the command and the CTRL-END keyboard shortcut.

That should do the trick!

-Russ

Andy T,

There is a way that you could create a single macro that would do all the four direction movements, but it sounds like you're having fun making macros yourself, so here's a way you can do it with both WSR Toolkit and a little bit of hand editing.

I'm assuming that what you really want to do is the equivalent of pressing the arrow key 40 times.

1. Use the Command Macros tab in WSR Toolkit to create four macros named like you want. In the Simulate Keypress area, make each macro move just a single arrow movement: Up, Down, Left, and Right.

2. Use Windows Explorer to display the Speech Macros folder. You should see files there that are named after the macros you created. They have .WSRMac extensions.

3. One at a time, open each file in a text editor like Wordpad or Notepad. You should see a line like the following, which will vary based on the direction key in the macro:

<sendKeys>{UP}</sendKeys>

4. Change the line to look like this:

<sendKeys times="40">{UP}</sendKeys>

5. Save and close the file. If you get any kind of error messages, that means there's probably a syntax error in the file that needs to be fixed.

6. Repeat the steps for the other three files, and you should have macro commands that are ready to go!

-Russ

Andy T,

Regarding question #1, I am referring to the four arrow keys on your keyboard.

Regarding question #2, Windows Explorer is a program that you can use for viewing files on your computer. You can access it by saying "Start Windows Explorer." Then you can navigate to display the Speech Macros folder, which is where your speech macros are stored.

At that point, you should see that WSR Toolkit creates individual files for the macros that you create with the WSR Toolkit. You can open and edit these files with any program that reads text files such as the Notepad and Wordpad programs that are included with Windows.

Regarding question #3, what I'm referring to here is opening each of the four text files for the macros you created and making a slight editing change to a single line in each file.

Regarding question #4, the modified line contains a little bit of additional text inserted in a specific location:

times="40"

This little bit if additional text causes the keystroke to execute 40 times instead of once.

Regarding question #6, since there are four files that need to be edited, after you do the first one, you need to repeat the steps three additional times for the three additional files.

And as for your final question, the answer is yes. You can use one, any, or all of ALT, CTRL, and SHIFT in order to execute keyboard shortcuts that involve any combination of those keys.

A final note: because I don't use WSR Toolkit regularly to edit macros, I overlooked an easier approach to making the... times="40" ...modification to the macros. Notice that when you're looking at the Command Macros tab in WSR Toolkit, there is a Macro Editor tab as well. You can click this tab and make the text modification directly in WSR Toolkit, which is easier than using a separate application like Notepad or WordPad. (See the WSR Toolkit manual for more information about this.)

Good luck! I hope you post back letting Marty and I know how it goes.

-Russ

Andy T,

Don't delete the macros. Make modifications to them in the Macro Editor tab of WSR Toolkit until they work the way you want.

I'm speculating because I haven't tried it, but I believe the reason the command is only executing 20 times is that there is an upper limit on the number of repeats that are supported in the <sendKeys> command. The way to fix this problem would be to repeat the command twice in each of the four macros as follows:

Each command executes, which gives you a total of 40 moves.

Regarding the problem where the command "go down 4" is now moving down 20 times, the problem is that WSR is misinterpreting 4 as 40, and it's executing a different command. I think you had a similar problem with some other commands, and I advised renaming the command that made it more distinctive. You could do the same thing here. For example, you could change the command names of each macro to something like "Way up 40" or "Jump up 40" to make them a little different than the built-in commands.

As for your question about whether or not to check the Alt, Control, and Shift check boxes, different combinations of these keys perform different functions. For example, saying "press up arrow" moves the insertion point up one line. But saying "press Control up arrow" moves the insertion point to the beginning of the current line or paragraph. You only want to choose these check boxes when you know what it's going to do.

The main point to grasp here is that it's really important to learn keyboard shortcuts for the applications you want to use if you want to be successful at creating macros. Many valuable macros can be created by simply providing a name for the macro and setting up the macro to execute a keyboard shortcut that you want. Fortunately, there are a lot of good sources for learning the keyboard shortcuts in programs, such as printed manuals and online help that came with the program, or Google searches.

-Russ