AutoHotkey Community

[twwilliams]

Has anyone had any success using AHK to set the focus to rich edit controls in Outlook 2003?

In particular, I'm interested in setting the focus to the Find Contact edit control in the toolbar or the Lookout search control in the Toolbar.

Window Spy detects these as RichEdit20W1 and RichEdit20W3 and ControlFocus will set focus to these controls, but they don't respond normally to typing at that point -- the Find Contact control stays greyed out and the Lookout control allows me to enter text, but not the backspace key.

I then tried ControlClick and that was even worse -- just a funny-looking cursor.

I even tried using MouseClick to click on the X,Y coordinates. It clicked there, but Outlook immediately refocused the cursor somewhere else so that I still couldn't type.

I'm trying to set up hotkeys to put the focus in these controls that don't have keyboard shortcuts, but they're defeating me.

The Help control (Type a question for help) behaves similarly.

Has anyone seen this and/or found a solution?

Here's the code (I've found that using both ControlFocus and MouseClick is more successful than not, although it only works in the Lookout control and not the native Outlook Find Contact control):

[Chris]

[twwilliams]

Thanks for the suggestion, Chris, but that doesn't work for me because I'm looking up addresses from a global address book rather than from my Contacts. I can pull up that address book with the built-in Ctrl-Shift-B shortcut, but there are some nice things about the edit control.

Outlook 2003 is indeed different than XP: AHK moves the mouse up to the control and clicks, but the focus doesn't stay there, and Outlook even sometimes gets into a funny state until I physically click the mouse.

I think I'm going to have to work out a set of keystrokes that get me into the toolbar and then tab around to get where I want:

[Chris]

Great idea; I'm glad Outlook at least allows that (perhaps to avoid the wrath of users with disabilities).