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MACROS
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Keep your Tools in Order
When the Pathfinder runs through a Macro, it tries to do things in order.
This can have an effect on whether it will actually work or not. Here's
a good example:
A client wanted to modify her Word Strategy so that when she hit the
SPELL/MINSPEAK key it would actually say "Go to Spell" when
in Minspeak Mode and "Go to Minspeak" when in Spell Mode. The
first idea was to change the Key Assignments.
So, under the SPELL MODE assignment she put <SPEECH-MARKER>Go
to Minspeak<GO-TO-MINSPEAK>. The <SPEECH-MARKER> simply has
the effect of speaking whatever comes after it but not sending it to the
screen.
However, what happened was that when she hit the key, it spelled out
the phrase "go to minspeak" letter by letter. Not good!
The solution was to change the order of the Tools in the macro to <GO-TO-MINSPEAK><SPEECH-MARKER>Go
to Minspeak. This worked fine. But why?
In the first solution, she had the "Speak When Spelling" (in
the FEEDBACK MENU) set to words and letter. So, when she hit the SPELL/MINSPEAK
key, the PF tried to speak letter by letter because it was still
in Spell Mode. In the second example, the PF went to Minspeak Mode first,
then spoke, and because it wasn't in Spell Mode, it didn't speak
it letter by letter.
The point of this is that if you do design a macro and it doesn't quite
work as you expect, consider the order of the commands and changing that
may help.
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