Tutorial - Capture a Macro - Assigning Hot Key First

Our example recording will be in the Windows Paint program. Let's run the Windows Paint program. To do so, click on Start | Run from the bottom left of the computer screen, enter "mspaint" and click the ok button. Once Paint is running, we want to switch directly to Macro Express. If you are running Macro Express in the system tray, left click on the Macro Express icon in the system tray; otherwise, click on Macro Express in the taskbar.

From the Macro Express Explorer pane click on Macros | Add Macro or click on the Capture icon. A new window should appear titled Add Macro.

Hot Keys should already be selected and the blinking cursor should be in the edit box. If the cursor is not in the edit box, click on the edit box with the mouse to place it there. Next, hold down the SHIFT key, the CTRL key and the U key all at the same time and then release them. CTRL+SHIFT+U should appear in the edit box. This is the hot key we will define for our macro and the one that will be assigned to whatever we record. Click on the button Capture Macro. The Capture Macro pane will appear.

For the nickname, enter My Paint Drawing. We have several options that we can set regarding the nature of the capture. Defaults for all these options can be set and we will illustrate how to do so in the next section. For now, we will instruct you on what settings to use for this recording. Click on Program for the scope. This indicates that the recorded macro will only play back in the program we record it in. Put a checkmark next to Capture Keystrokes, Capture Mouse, Capture At and Actual Speed. Also select Window for the Relative To option for the mouse capture. We want to start capturing the macro inside of the paint program. Under Choose the program to start capturing in, we want to select the paint program. This most likely will show up as "untitled - Paint". Once selected, click on the Start Capture button. This should make Macro Express disappear from the screen and the last program running before Macro Express should appear. This should be the Paint program.

The macro is now recording. Let's do something fairly simple in the Paint program. Let's draw a face. Click on a color, and then draw a circle and place two eyes, a nose and mouth on it. Terminate the macro capture by pressing the same hot key we are capturing to. Press CTRL+SHIFT+U.  A message should appear indicating that the capture is complete. Let's go back and play our recorded macro.  Bring paint to the front of the screen (click on it in the taskbar). We want to start with a clean screen in paint so choose File | New from the main menu in paint. After the screen is clear, press CTRL+SHIFT+U.  The face that you just drew should be redrawn complete with any hesitations that you may have made while doing so!