Record ribbon Paste menu selection

Questions & Suggestions
1

I’m trying to find a way to trigger the “Keep Source Formatting” submenu of the “Paste” menu found on the ribbon of Outlook 2016 for Mac. When I try to record selecting that item, I get screen coordinates which won’t work because the ribbon doesn’t stay in the same place. I also can’t seem to find a way to assign a keyboard shortcut to that menu item. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks.

Jim C.

2

Popup menus are tricky to control. To select a popup menu, you need to simulate a click on the menu, and then use typeahead to select the desired item, ie actions:

Click on popup menu
Insert Text by Typing “Menu Name%Return%”

The tricky part is clicking on the menu. First, make sure you have paused long enough to allow the window to come to the front and the screen to be stable, and then you can need to click on the popup. You can click in one of these ways:

  • if the window has keyboard focus, then you can click relative to the window, and if the popup menu is in a fixed location, then that may be a reliable solution.
  • click relative to the found image. If the popup menu always defaults to the same thing, then you can use the popup menu as the image. Otherwise, you need to click relative to something nearby that is consistent (like some label text).

To click relative to an image, you use the Mouse Click action, configure it to be relative to a found image, and take a screenshot of the desired area of the screen using Command-Control-Shift-4, and paste it into the image well on the action. The image has to be unique (which includes not being visible in the action if the image is small enough not to be shrunk in the image well) otherwise Keyboard Maestro will not know where to click. The Display option in the action will allow you to see where Keyboard Maestro is matching.