AutoHotkey Community

WaywardMonk · Joined: 20 Jun 2005 Posts: 17

Where I work now, the word processor operators use MS Word and MS Word tables for lists that I want to see in MS Excel. They also insert lots of hard returns in the tables which makes it difficult to import the table into MS Excel properly. I tried importing the tables as HTML documents - the hard returns still cause data to spread over several cells rather than appearing one cell.

So I wrote this little script to copy the table data over to a spreadsheet for me.

My questions are:
1. The script works if I use SendMode Play, but not if I use SendMode Input - can somebody tell me why? (What happens is, with SendMode Input the script doesn't stop when it reaches "end" in the last Word table row - almost as if it didn't detect it.
2. Would it actually run any faster if I used SendMode Input rather than SendMode Play?

The script works well for me, if a little slowly - fortunately, MS Word tables get unwieldy if they get too big so the tables are not usually much bigger than about 200 rows. It will most likely only work correctly with simple tables - i.e. no nested tables, merged cells, etc.

To use the script, You have to insert "end" (without the quotes) into a blank cell at the end of the table to tell the script where it must stop. You will be asked how many columns there are in the table, and you will have to position the cursor in the first table cell.

Micahs · Joined: 01 Dec 2006 Posts: 338

I don't have Word to test it to see if it makes any difference, but have you tried ClipWait after "Send ^c{TAB}"?
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WaywardMonk · Joined: 20 Jun 2005 Posts: 17

Thanks for the reminder Smile

I tried it after you reminded me. This time the script detected "end" in the last table cell and moved to the next loop, but no data was copied over to Excel - all was blank, as if the array was empty.

I did speed the script up considerably by removing "WinActivate" and "WinWaitActive" from the loop, but the script still only works with SendMode Play, not SendMode Input.

Micahs · Joined: 01 Dec 2006 Posts: 338

I've done some stuff with 'send' and found that sometimes it can help to separate send commands with delays or whatnot. Maybe:

BETLOG · Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 6:36 am Post subject:

doing a :
clipboard = %clipboard%
will strip out any formatting and other unexpected stuff. I am frequently surprised at instances where I need to use this.. especially with excel data.

WaywardMonk · Joined: 20 Jun 2005 Posts: 17

Thanks, Micahs and BETLOG for your inputs.

I'm afraid using clipboard =%clipboard% produced an AHK script error along the lines of "/" being an illegal character.

Using ClipWait made the script wait at every empty table cell. Clipwait, 2 was better BUT I still experienced the same problem trying to use Sendmode Input. <sigh>

I guess it's something in MS Excel that just works a little oddly.

On the plus side, I've managed to refine the script a bit and it now works a bit faster. Wish I understood the reason for the Sendmode Input problem, though.

BETLOG · Posted: Sun May 13, 2007 8:47 am Post subject:

Not sure if this is helpful, but I have also had success with a similar recent problem by using piping. <, >, etc

fieldContents = Your problem Text`r`n
FileDelete,TextContainingHardReturnsThatAreAProblem.txt
FileAppend,%fieldContents%,TextContainingHardReturnsThatAreAProblem.txt

run curl.exe -F "somefield=<TextContainingHardReturnsThatAreAProblem.txt"

Obviously my context is different, and I'm not surehow this applies in the absence of a %comspec% command line, but you might find it useful anyway.