Capturing the contents of text boxes and list boxes
You probably know that you can use the PrintScreen button on the keyboard to copy
everything on your screen to the clipboard, or ALT-PrintScreen to copy the active window.
From there you can paste the snapshot into any Windows application like Word or Outlook.
These pictures are typically referred to as screenshots. PrintScreen is pretty limited,
but at $0 US (0.00 €), you can hardly argue with the price.
Snagit from TechSmith (http://www.techsmith.com)
allows for much more functionality
than simple screen capture. In fact, if you code in VBA, you can programmatically capture
images. See our
TechSmith interview concerning database documentation
and the
sample code
we used.
In addition to a variety of image capture options and image editing, the program
allows for text capture. Using optical character recognition, Snagit can ‘read’ the
text off the computer screen and represent it not as a picture, but as actual text.
Our favorite is text capture from a scrolling window. Take for example the
Tools > References… list in the VB Editor. It can have hundreds of entries
and finding the library to reference is difficult.
Since you can’t search a list box
or text box, you have to look at each entry individually.
With the Auto Scroll Window feature and text capture, you can click on a
long combination box, drop down list or list box and pull everything out in text. Then just do a simple copy and paste into Word or Excel and use their text searching functionality
to wade through all of the choices.
See the video
in Windows Media format and try it on your own drop downs and list boxes.
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