AutoHotkey Webinar- Automating Outlook and COM

In our first hour of today’s  AutoHotkey webinar we talked about various ways you can automate MS Outlook.  We covered the below scripts:

1. Creating an HTML email (Also see this video)
2. Performing mail-merge on the above HTML email
3. Integrating a mail-merge from an active Excel file  (Also see this video)
4. Looping over emails in a folder
5. Creating appointments in Outlook
6. Creating an address book from looping over emails in Outlook

You can get the scripts here

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The second hour dove a bit deeper into using Outlook and Excel.  We also talked through a few user’s questions.

Below is the information that was reviewed in the PowerPoint deck we reviewed:

Script Highlight:

Sift by FanaticGuru uses Regular Expressions and nGrams* to fuzzy match strings

*n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items

COM– Component Object Model

• What is COM?
• Some of the programs COM integrates with:

• Excel
• Word
• PowerPoint
• Outlook
• Publisher
• Internet Explorer
• HTML File (interact with HTML)
• Windows Explorer
• File System object
• WinHTTPRequest (API calls-Possibilities are endless!)
• MSXML2 Dom Object (XML Parser)
• Scripting Dictionary
• Windows Media Player
• Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)
• ImageMagickObject
• Scheduled Tasks
• WMI Tasks (Windows Management Instrumentation)
• XStandard.Zip
• Speech API: SpVoice
• Dragon Naturally Speaking
• Adobe Acrobat Pro
• Synaptics touchpad
• Email delivery via CDO
• CAPICOM Series (digital signature, encryption etc.
• ADO (SQL queries to data sources)
• CuteFTP
• SPSS (Statistics tool)
• Much, much more!

Creating an HTML email in Outlook with AutoHotkey

1. Connect to Outlook or Create a new one (but may not deploy right then)
2. Create a New Mail Item object
3. Provide values for properties
   1. Specify Account Sending from
   2. Type of email (HTML, RTF, Text)  (Search here for Outlook Constants)
   3. Identify Recipients: To, CC, BBC
   4. Subject line
   5. HTML Body
   6. Attachments
   7. Delivery time (Fuse)
   8. Request Delivery Reciept
   9. Importance
   10. Display / Send
4. Convert above email to mail-merge with names & email addresses

Resources

AHK Forum:

• Mickers Tutorial
• Appointents
• Loop over emails

MSDN resources:

• Object Model
• Object Overview   Outlook Constants
• email
• Appointments
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Folders
• VBA examples

Outlook examples on the-Automator

Stack Overflow

AutoHotkey webinar on COM & Excel