March 17th AutoHotkey Newsletter

Howdy %Name%,

Are you crushing it? Have you learned what AutoHotkey can do and, like me, just blown away?

I just realized that I hadn’t shared this video on YouTube (it’s from our Intermediate AHK Udemy course). For those of you new to AutoHotkey, it’s a great, high-level overview of what you can do with 🅰️utoHotkey 💪. If you’re not new, I’d love to know what you think I should have mentioned in it.

AutoHotkey is an amazing tool. There’s so many ways you can use it to save you time⏰. There definitely is an investment to learn to code however it is worth every minute you spend!

BTW- The other day I borrowed a meme and adapted it to this. I think of AutoHotkey people as “doers” not people that sit around and talk forever about how to do things. What do you think?

Now on with the show…

🅰️HKCon‼️

Are you interested in attending the first AutoHotkey conference? I was talking to Thom Beech from TABNation during one of our Free Friday office hours and we decided it would be great to put something together for this summer. You can learn a bit about our plan here.

The Lost files

A long time ago the AutoHotkey forum used AutoHotkey.net to store files. Unfortunately it was hacked and the community lost a lot of great resources. While much of it was gone, people put together a nice list of scripts that were lost. In case you’ve never seen it, I made a short video and uploaded them here. Please keep in mind, I didn’t test all of the scripts in here so “Buyer beware” 💀

mySQL / ODBC connection

Have you tried to work with a SQL database but needed to get your connection string? The trickiest part to it is that, once you configure the driver / string you don’t have to do it again (it’s a “one and done” setting). So it’s easy to forget how to do it. For that reason Isaias and I made ourselves a video to document where we were getting it from for the mySQL ODBC connection. BTW I have a SQL Playlist in case you’re wanting to learn more about AutoHotkey & SQL

Producing AutoHotkey newsletter 📧

I have a popular playlist entitled What I automate with AutoHotkey where I document some amazing things I’ve done with AutoHotkey. I recently documented the creating of this newsletter.

AutoHotkey Wordle with source code💡

I was watching this video by Spawnova and he was showing his example of hacking Wordle. Do you play wordle? You can get Shin’s Wordle source code here.

What you need to know about Version2️

A while back we had a great webinar on V2️. I asked Dimitri Geerts and Isaias Baez to join me in another discussion to better understand what to look out for in V2, some of the new features, and what is most likely to trip you up. There were some really interesting things mentioned at the very end of the video. Not trying to make you stick around for the full two hours but the last 15 minutes had some things that you’ll want to know!

The-Automators’ Podcast

#135: How to best “sell” AutoHotkey (Convince others to use it)
#134: Interacting with a Live Stream
#133: Using a time study to quantify your efficiency

What we’re reading 📚

What does “Run as Administrator” mean in Windows1️0️?
PSA: Telegram Chats Aren’t End-to-End Encrypted by Default
5️ Cool Things You Can Do With a Raspberry Pi

AutoHotkey GURU 👨‍🏫 Interview:

Back in 2018 I chatted with JoeDF regarding how he got into, and uses, AutoHotkey. At times there were bandwidth issues but it was still a great call!

Productivity tips ⚡️

Listen to music that doesn’t have lyrics (or the lyrics are in another language). Personally I’ll often throw on Zydeco music which is usually very up-beat and “feels” like it’s in another language.

A spot of Humor 🤣

01189998819991197253 is a tad harder than 867-5309‼️

Quotable quotes 🗣️ 💭

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything. — Thomas Sowell
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work. — Stephen King
Even Napoleon had his Watergate — Yogi Berra
Challenge your belief systems. It’s better to realize you’ve been wrong for years, than to stubbornly hold onto a delusion that holds you back. — John Carlton

Live AutoHotkey Support Tomorrow

Don’t forget on Friday’s you can get free AutoHotkey support on my YouTube channel. Or you can sign up for reminders and join the zoom room. 👍

The-Automator

Joe and staff

P.S. Special thanks to the following for purchasing multiple AutoHotkey Udemy courses this month!

March 10th AutoHotkey Newsletter

Howdy %Name%,

No matter where you live, it’s impossible to not feel the effects of gas prices & inflation! Current estimates have the rate of inflation in the US between 6-10%. That’s crazy high however, given what’s going on in the world with Ukraine / Russia, I think it’s just the beginning of sky-rocketing prices. Why? Because nearly everything is delivered by vehicles! These gas price increases are going to be driving up the prices very soon!

So why am I bitching about it in the 🅰️🇺t🇴🇭🇴tk🇪🇾 🇳ewsletter? Because I 💯% believe the best way you can get a raise 💵is to BE WORTH MORE! One of the best ways to be worth more is to invest in yourself! People that learn AutoHotkey:

Get work done faster
Are more productive
Produce fewer errors
Provide more consistent work / deliverables
Are less likely to quit

Of course employers LOVE all the above! As a direct result they try and reward them. The #1 way of doing such is to 💰 pay them more! So commit to yourself today to find ways to be worth more!

Learning AutoHotkey is just one of many ways to improve yourself! Of course the best part of this is where’s the risk? If your employer doesn’t increase you’re pay you’re STILL WORTH MORE!

In case you missed the video I did ranting about being worth more, you can see it here; it’s one of my personal favorites!

Now on with the show…

Calculating time savings

A few years back I created this spreadsheet 📈 to help calculate savings /earnings by automating programs. Do you ever try and calculate this? Also, do you think I should create a version of the spreadsheet in AutoHotkey?

Regular Expressions

I was amazed how many people that do some coding are not aware of Regular Expressions. When I first became aware of them I thought they were neat but that I rarely had the need. But the more programs I wrote, the more I realized parsing text is a very common task to have! In this Intro to RegEx video I cover the basics. You can see my RegEx playlist here. I also highly recommend Jack Dunning’s book on RegEx. I bought it years ago and it really helped me learn them quickly and easily.

AutoHotkey Commands verse Functions

Speaking of parsing text, the other day I released a video showing both the Command StringSplit and the function StrSplit(). It’s one of the things that often confuses people new to AutoHotkey so I talk through both and why I prefer functions over commands.

MS Word Macro recorder and COM

I’ve recently made a few videos demonstrating using AHK & COM to automate MS Word. In this video I didn’t have an example to borrow from so I showed how I used the built-in Word VBA macro recorder to generate the VBA code and then adapt it to AutoHotkey COM code. COM is an amazing way to, programmatically, connect to and automate Word!

Using AutoHotkey to auto-generate numbers & delimiters

I’m not in love with how the script was implemented, but I love the idea and that he’s made a video showing how you can easily generate numbers parsed by a character. I’d make some tweaks to it but very cool to see others pushing out AutoHotkey examples!

Selecting and saving a file path in an ini file

Getting user feedback is a great way to make a script more flexible. Here Thom, from TAB Nation, shows how you can easily get user feedback and save in an ini file.