Thanks for the caveats, I'll bear that in mind. Though with alt-tab and tab and such (no mouse movement or clicking necessary, if I set it up right) I'm guessing it will work fine.
Even if it doesn't save time, fabricating something to do it for me is far less mindnumbing than doing it myself
Bored engineers are dangerous.
Oh its definitely less mind numbing.
It's generally pretty good, the main issue to watch out for is that anything that requires the mouse itself to be offset with each repetition won't work.
The second thing to look out for is to always leave the working space in the same state you started with (things like focused fields, open programs, etc) so that the next loop is ready to go. The values can change, of course. So one thing I've done is used a calculator to supply values, like I need to have something say 10,20,30,40,50...counting up each loop. I prime the calculator with 0+10, then start my first loop by hitting "enter, ctrl-C" and now the value I need for each loop is stored in the clipboard, as subsequent "enters" on the calculator will take the current value and add 10.
Use the mouse as little as possible. The macro is pretty smart about it (and can move windows to their recorded location and do mouseclicks at offsets relative to the window) but mouse actions tend to be the thing that breaks most often, as there's very little error detection.