AutoHotkey Community

New to the board.

I want start automating documents (MS Word) - populating multiple documents (templates) with data from source documents. Basic concept, but complex in its execution.

Where should I focus my energy? VB, AHK? Other? Keyboards with macro functionality? With the exception of experimenting with the free visual basic tools, I'm new to macros.

Thank you in advance for your insight and helping me get started down the right path.

Brian

if your "source documents" are MS-Office-documents as well,
you should focus on VB.
If you use AHK, you need using the AHK-COM-library; you will probably achieve all your goals with ahk too, we have some COM-experts offering help in this forum, especially Sean, the creator of the COM-lib. But most COM-Knownledge here is about automating the IE.

Keyboards with macro-functionality are ONLY usefull for gamers. And that is only because these macros are executed at driver level, so games will not know, that you are cheating. For all other uses, AHK is much better than Keyboard-macros, simply because of the much great possibilities AHK has to offer.

Thanks Z-Gecko - I appreciate your comments.

Brian: VBA is your friend. To get started you can make Word record a macro for you which does approximately what you want, then you can open the VBA editor to modify and add code to make it more generic.