Litigation Support Deus ex machina

Litigation support is often all about automating steps on a computer to make a project go faster. You may find yourself at a loss on how to write (or find) the script or macro you need for a project. In this case if your task involves a limited series of keyboard entries and mouse clicks which must be repeated over and over again, you can make use of programs like Auto Keyboard. See: http://www.autokeyboard.com/

This software allows the user to enter a series of keyboard and mouse commands and then repeat them an unlimited number of times. I recently made use of this program when I wanted to split up several hundred Excel files into individual worksheets. (I had an Access macro to import Excel files with a single worksheet into an Access database, but not workbooks wiht multiple tabs.) The Excel macro I had would do this for a single workbook, but not multiple Excel files. The commands shown in the screen grab below did the following:

1. selected a windows explorer window on the left of my screen

2. moved down one file

3. entered F2 to rename

4. copied the file name

5. opened the Excel file

6. Ran the Macro

7. pasted the file name when prompted by the macro (it was entering a bates number to distinguish between the worksheets from each of the several hundred Excel files that had similar data and worksheet names).

8. Clicked OKAY when prompted by the Macro twice.

9. Saved the file.

10. Closed the file.

This process was repeated several hundred times, and I was freed up to do other work. I have used the same program to automate the downloading of files from a web site. This is one product for which there really is a million and one uses.