Some of the software is out of date, there is 4 different apps/databases plus excel she needs to click through on to process a single payment, plus checking. She now has the tasked swollen to the point she has to do at least 300-400 every end of month and it is now taking many hours of her time. Mostly unpaid overtime...
So it is entirely able to be automated, except the PC is the most heavily locked down thing I have ever seen, you can't run portable apps, install browser extensions etc etc. Plus everything you try that is verboten sends a report back to HQ and after not many reports questions are asked.
Business is not interested in solving such problems, their answer is "just spend an extra 20-30 hours a month riding the mouse". Well you can guess what I think of that.
So I think to automate this task with an external PC, HDMI capture card and maybe an Arduino or similar to generate mouse and keyboard commands, controlled by USB (serial) commands from the external automation PC.
Obviously with this method it is all shortcut keys and image matching for mouse co-ords to press, so Sikulux or some custom Python maybe.
Has anyone done this? I searched for quite a while and could not come up with any specific examples that anyone else had done anything similar.
I can't see why it would be a big problem ,other than setup time and some potential fragility, but payoffs would be big. I'm surprised not more people have not had similar problems, am I missing something?
1) Clipboard history. Windows key + v to turn it on. Part of windows, no installation required. Then winkey + v shows your recent clipboard items and you can use them over again. You can pin frequently used commands.
1.5) Windows key + R. Open up a simple gui to run 1 line commands. Has a history you can access with the up and down arrows. You can do amazing things in 1 line of DOS.
2) Dos cmd terminal. Part of windows, no installation required. You can make simple scripts called .bat files
3) Powershell. Part of windows, no installation required. Difficult to learn, frozen in place at version 5 I think.
4) Power Automate. Part of Office Online, no installation required (if they use Office 365) Difficult to learn. The whole Power apps community has a lot of potential, depends on your Windows license.
5) Power Automate Desktop. Free from MS for most MS environments. Can do a lot with this. If I had to pick one this would be it.
6) Power FX. An Excel scripting language from MS, but only available in the Excel web version of Enterprise O365. I guess it's a version of typescript, and feels a bit like Power Query. Worth taking a look at so you know it's there.
6.5) Power Query. Part of Excel Desktop. Not for querying, despite the name, but for getting rid of all the crap in excel files. Not faster than doing it yourself, unless you have to clean up the same excel file over and over, then you can save the query and automate that part.
7) Windows365. Like an azure ms desktop, but a fixed price virtual windows 10. Acccess it through your browser, but can share files and clipboard. About USD 40 a month. But, it's just like win10 home, you can install whatever software you want.
8) AutoHotkey Needs your sysadmin admin to allow a 1 time install. Steep learning curve but it's everything your wife wants. Very deep user base and community.
9) Any of the RPA enverionments like UI-Path and so on. Very expensive and needs big corporate buy in. Never tried any so don't know. MS liked 5) PAD so much they bought it and made it free (their SOP to run competitors out of the business) so that tells you something.
Honorable mention: Programable keyboards (send a string when a key is pressed). Never tried one but would like to.
When something breaks (and it will) as long as she has made the problem known with management in a traceable and deliberate way. It will be fixed only then (sadly this is how humanity is).
Cheers
Edit: speeling
If you don't have file extensions turned on, you can use VBA inside office to create the vbs file for you, and then open it via notepad. A variant on this is .hta files, again Google these, most people don't know they exist so don't block them.
You can also create .CMD or .bat files for DOS scripting, .PS1 files for powershell, and .URL files to launch apps that may be hidden or blocked.
However, if they know what they are doing with the locked down Group Policies, all of this may be locked out. Theres many exploits you could try, that I've not gone into I've found in the past that typically something has been missed, and you can get what you need.
All of that said, breaking out of the prison her IT dept have created may be cause for her employment to be terminated, so tread carefully.