Sample Macro

Every macro command can be viewed two different ways: as it appears in the Script Editor and in ASCII format as it appears in the Direct Editor.

There is a macro command that allows you to choose a date such as 07/10/08 and have the system return it in a specified format such as 10-Jul-2008. But, there is a problem. Unlike most other macro commands, this command does not allow you to use a variable as the starting date.

This command looks like this in the Script Editor:

Using 07/10/08 as a starting date, converting it to the format DD-MM-YYYY and putting the result into %T11%, the command would look like this in the Direct Editor:

What we are going to do is put this command into a variable and then run the macro in the variable. The result of doing this is that the modified date will be placed in variable %T11%.

First we need to substitute variables for the month, day and year instead of the hard-coded ‘7/10/2008’. We will assume that the month is in variable %T15%, the day is in variable %T16% and the year is in %T17%. The command now looks like this:

Note that the | that appears twice in this command is actually a special separator character. We cannot reliably enter the separator character into a variable so we will substitute \s for each separator character. The string now looks like this:

Since we are only interested in converting the date we can ignore the time (12:00:00 AM).

So the trick is to set variable %T9% to this string and use the ‘Run Macro in Variable’ command to place the result in variable %T11%.