Data entry can be a dreadful and even malignant part of one's job. After spending hours repetitively clicking and typing, I began looking into various macro applications to record mouse and keyboard input. By far, I have had the best experiences with Autohotkey. It has saved me hours of tedious work and given my wrist some much needed relief.

Due to its unique scripting language, Autohotkey was a little intimidating at first. It includes a recorder, however, so I did not need to know any syntax to get started. Depending upon what I was doing and the applications I wanted to interact with, some small tweaking of the script was required from time to time. After tweaking a few scripts I created with the recorder, I quickly grasped some basic commands that enabled me to create functional scripts without using the recorder at all.

Some examples of frequent commands I use, most of which are fairly straight forward:

• Sleep 1000- delays the script for one second
• SendInput {CTRLDOWN}v{CTRLUP}- sends keystrokes, in this case CTRL+V which is the keyboard shortcut for paste
• MouseClick, left, 651, 453- simulates a left mouse click at the x, y pixel coordinates of 651 and 453 (of the window that has focus, i.e. "on top")
• WinActivate, Microsoft Excel- brings the Excel window to focus
• F2::Pause- makes F2 a hotkey for pausing the execution of the script

An issue that I often ran into using Autohotkey is that some applications' (*grumble* Salesforce *grumble*) graphical user interfaces do not have consistent placement. This would often break my script, since, for example, the button I wanted to click on would not be in the position I specified. To work around this, I often had to re-think how I could accomplish whatever I wanted to do with keyboard shortcuts. For example, rather than clicking on that Save button that kept moving around in every other Salesforce record, maybe I could use the TAB key to highlight the button and then the ENTER key to activate the button.

I also use a very simple Autohotkey script to save time coding some basic HTML. When I press "p" immediately followed by ENTER, paragraph tags will pop up in my text editor. My favorite is trigged by typing "hre" followed by ENTER, which pops in the full href tag required for displaying a link in HTML and pastes whatever I have copied to the clipboard (hopefully the URL I was trying to link) in the proper location. Check out this YouTube video for a demonstration and then share how Autohotkey helped you at Social Source Commons.