I am trying to use the keyboard to trigger the Save as Picture... feature in PowerPoint. This feature is only available in the menu that appears after you right click on an object in a PowerPoint slide. As explained here this is not possible using PowerPoint or Apple System tools.
I thought it must be able to be done with Keyboard Maestro, but I can't figure out how to do it. I've tried using Interface Actions like the Select or Show a Menu Item, but there doesn't appear to be any way to select menu items which only appear in a right-click menu.
Is anything wrong with using the KM action which presses a mouse button on the object? Then perhaps getting KM to press the key S would get you to the menu item, then perhaps Enter would select the item. Just a guess, because I don't have your app.
Or, is anything wrong with turning on the Mouse Keys feature in macOS and then using a keystroke to simulate the right click at mouse location. This may work if my first idea doesn't work.
You didn't indicate whether the mouse is already over the location of the object that you want to click on. This is important to know. Or do you need KM to find the object on the screen first? Hopefully the user has already placed the mouse over the object and what you are needing is for KM to be triggered (perhaps by a keyboard hotkey?) and access the menu from there. I can't tell if this is what you want to do. Am I correctly inferring what you want?
@Airy thank you for trying, but I think I need help from someone with Microsoft Office, perhaps the 2nd most popular software in the world.
This PowerPoint feature works by right clicking on the object (which selects it in a sense) and then choosing Save as Picture... so one would first have to select the object and then press the KM trigger keys. See the link in the original post for more details.
Contextual menus can be a pain to access. Luckily you can still use image detection on them -- but they often aren't "part of" the document window, so the trick is to use in front window's screen instead.
Demo that assumes the pointer is already over the object you want to save:
@Nige_S I appreciate that you actually tried it and got it to work in PowerPoint. I would love to see a screen recording of it working, but I wonder if that's even possible with KM.
I spent over and hour trying to get your script to work. It wasn't that different from my own, but I wanted to use yours since it definitely worked.
Despite many debugging attempts using alerts to show me the problem step it would never work. It seems that it get's stuck on the "Pause until conditions are met" action. Of course, I put my own image in. Here it is:
Is other image detection working in KM? And try increasing the fuzziness (the action's slider).
Otherwise, replace it with a 0.5 second pause and see what happens -- you'll get a more meaningful error message from the "Click at image" action because it is trying to do something rather than just sitting and waiting.
And try the "Keystrokes" version, no image detection required.
@Nige_S Yes, image detection is working -- in fact with that very image displayed elsewhere on the screen, then it gets through to the last alert.
But the main point is that it works for you and not for me. Can you make a screen recording while yours is working? I want to know if this is possible because I like to make screen recordings to demonstrate things but really wonder if that's possible with KM macros? I'm not experienced enough with KM obviously...
@Nige_S Thanks -- that really helps. It makes me sure that you really do have it working -- please don't feel offended -- it's not that I don't trust you. It's that I don't trust anyone.
I have now got it working with the keyboard method and I learned something. I'll keep working on the image method and one day hopefully I figure it out.
I don't trust me, so there's no worries on that front! But the recording could just as easily be me doing it manually, or a set of clicks at preset coordinates rather than image detection, or any number of other things -- which is why I'm not sure how it helps.
Found Image actions can be pernickity, which is why it's better to use other methods if you can -- @Airy's keystroke method is a much better option IMO.
I'm pleased that my little quip about not trusting anyone has had the desired effect. Indeed, the initial response ("I don't trust myself") could have been written by me.
