How to Web Scrape with AutoHotkey: Setting values and clicking links in IE

Setting values and clicking links in IE

Setting values and clicking links in IEThis is the second video in this series.  Here we practice setting values and clicking links in IE on a page (kind of reverse of Web Scraping with AutoHotkey however I don’t believe anybody has coined a decent term yet) and clicking links.

Word of warning- some pages want you to fire an “event”.  Sometimes this is tricky.  Given this video is set to an introductory level I only touch a little on the subject.

Web Scraping with AutoHotKey 102-Setting values and clicking links in IE

Setting values and clicking links in IE

The syntax for writing the writing the code can be found on my first post here.  There is also an AutoHotKey forum thread you might wish to review here.  Setting values and clicking links in IE is pretty straight forward

Web scraping

 (web harvesting or web data extraction) is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites. Usually, such software programs

Transfer systems automatically regardless of their sources

transfer systems

TTwo colleagues look at a laptop together in a bright office, while a woman holds papers and smiles at a bearded man beside her.ransfer Systems regardless of their sources

Our clients enter campaigns into a SharePoint page that need to be transferred to our CMS. Unfortunately the two systems are not tied in any way and there are no existing API Web Services that we can leverage.

There are over 250 items that might be selected which means we end up taking a lot of time to, manually, transfer the campaigns.

I wrote a script with AutoHotKey that automates much of the process (as well as replacing Unicode values with their HTML equivalents).  This allows me to transfer systems automatically with very little effort!

This saves a TON of mundane time by performing web scraping with AutoHotkey and is more reliable than doing it manually.

Four colleagues seated at a meeting table, with a green AutoHotkey water bottle in the center

Automate Excel graphs with AutoHotKey and SPSS; Automating pretty charts!

Automate Excel graphsA white stress ball with the green AutoHotkey logo being held in a hand, with a laptop keyboard blurred in the backgroundAfter 20 years of doing multivariate statistics, doing analytics is very quick and easy for me.  Putting together the report which clients will think is “pretty” and convey the results is what really takes the time!  I have a ton of macros in SPSS which greatly simplify the front-end however I’ve always preferred Excel graphs to SPSS (because they don’t look like they were drawn with crayons).

Automate Excel graphs

In the below video I demonstrate how you how you can use AutoHotKey to easily automate Excel graphs that you’ll be proud to put your name on!

Two women smiling and looking at a computer screen together in a bright office, one pointing at the monitor.