Useful: Automate Windows tasks with AutoIt

Published June 6th, 2006

I found AutoIt a while ago but only just got around to doing anything useful with it. It’s a simplified environment for scripting in Windows, giving easy access to GUI widgets and a variety of reasonably powerful commands for building small Windows apps. What makes it especially useful is that you can compile your finished scripts into standalone .exe files for distribution. And it’s free.

I used it to help out someone who needed a simple app that would take a list of names stored in a text file and create files with those names. Within 20 minutes of downloading the app I had a rough but working executable that did the job. For the sake of my own curiosity, I went on and developed it a bit, giving it a ‘proper’ GUI with a file chooser (for the source text file) and directory chooser (for output) and even an option to change the file extension for output files. That took a couple of hours: more than the task merited, but as an exercise it was interesting for me and showed just how much can be achieved in a short time even when you’re a complete novice with the software.

In the unlikely event that anyone needs a similar tool, here’s the executable and the AutoIt source file (right-click and save). As usual, I take no responsibility for any damage done etc.

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