How I Use Keyboard Maestro at Work

whenever i show someone at work how i use keyboard maestro to automate parts of my work the most common reaction is laughter i think part of it is a realization of just how nerdy i am and i appreciate that but then as i show them kind of more and what i do with it it really people are really seem to be impressed with how much you can do with this app and i've wanted to make a video for a long time about keyboard maestro and showing off how i use it and i wasn't quite sure how to address this topic because there's so much here i don't use nearly all the functionality of the app so i don't want to do like a full walkthrough of the app i don't necessarily want to do a review of it i think it's great i wanted to show you some actual use cases that i have with the app so i see a lot of videos with stuff like this that show automation on devices and they show these kind of generic examples i feel like oftentimes and you're like i'm not going to do that and i don't think the person making this video even uses this they're just using it as an example so what i'm going to do is show you most of the things that i use at work specifically i'm going to copy them from my work computer where i can't show you stuff but onto my personal device i'm going to make some mock-ups that show you exactly kind of what things i do with keyboard maestro i think it's really cool hopefully this will serve as inspiration on how to use the app better if you've already purchased it and if you haven't purchased it and have been wondering is it for me like what are some actual use cases for it hopefully this will help with that as well so with that out of the way let's jump into the screen share okay i'll show you how some of this works in a second but again this isn't a tutorial it's just giving you an idea of what sort of things i do so basic text expansion is part of it so i just do add at to do my work email i can do some credit cards so i actually use a lot of test credit card numbers in my testing and my work day to day and so i do semicolon v to do visa do an m to do mastercard discover and amex oops a little quick on that one the amex one there we go so that's how you kind of enter those easily throughout the day there's also some other stuff like if i do dd date or dd 8 then i can see the date formatted how i need it so i just need this every once in a while to create something so i may do something like a note in drafts for example and i could do daily notes or actually here's a better one i will do meeting notes and then date there we go and so now i have my meeting notes for this date and that's documented i can just go from there so those are some of the easy simple text expansion things that you can do there's tons of other apps that do this but i use keyboard maestro already so this is just one less app i need to have installed but let's do some more advanced stuff right so let me shoot on over to here so we have a lot of test sites that we log into and these have just universally known simple logins and these are not used anywhere else you definitely do not want to use your actual username and password for this but these test accounts it doesn't really matter and so what i do is i have this basically super shortcut that i have so it's control option and command i hit all three of those and then i have three different users i log into and i have those mapped to qw and e so q logs me in to the admin user the secondary user is with w and then the third user is with e that's limited user and what it's doing here it's going pretty fast so you can't really see it but it's typing out the username it's hitting tab it's typing out the password it's hitting enter and then it's uh that's that fills out the form so it logs me in so whenever i'm on one of my login pages i just hit that and it goes now here's kind of a wild one so me and my team work in collaboration in uh google docs to write our release notes so we do like blog posts to give more details on what's going on and so here's you know it's it's not real text but basically once we're done we copy the post and then we go over to our blogging system which is not ghost but is just what i have available to me right now we go to new post and then here's the cool thing is i'm just gonna hit one keyboard shortcut and i'm gonna get something really cool so i'm gonna hit my super keys my three keys and then b and so there we go so it made a headline for me with a specific date i'll show you how we get that date in a second and then release notes and then it pasted everything i had in from google docs so boom there's my post i can just publish it right away and it works so that one's really cool let me show you actually how that one works because that's a bit of a rabbit hole so if i go over to keyboard maestro and this is a really advanced one so stick with me but yeah i've got blog post here and i'm going to expand this view a little bit so we can see more of it it doesn't look that complicated right so i hit the hotkey which is those keys with b and then i have the mouse click on a found image so i have post title it's really small there but you should be able to see it post title looks for that on the page it clicks there and then it does a macro so macros are what all of these shortcuts are and so it says get next release date blog so what's that so let me pull that up i'm going to do get next release date blog now this one's more complicated so this one is doing some variable stuff and some date logic and so basically again this is not a tutorial but in short i'm finding what's the next tuesday and what's the next thursday and it's using some date time logic to figure that out and then it's comparing the two and is figuring out which one is sooner so if tuesday is sooner then we're going to create a variable called next release blog that has the value for the next tuesday formatted like this so year month day and then if it's not then we can assume thursday is so it'll be those and basically this is because in my company we deploy these releases on tuesdays and thursdays and we always write these blog posts before the next one so it's after the tuesday so we always post them on wednesday or monday the day before one of these and so uh this is basically how i determine what's the date for the release that we're doing so anyway we figure that it and it spits out next release blog if i go back to the blog post i can see okay so we ran this thing that variable next release blog is then entered when we type so we type in the date we get space release notes we tab down and we paste in and so again that's what you would have seen here so if i delete the whole post and start over and do it one more time you can kind of see that ah well ghost kind of screwed up there so let me try it again there you are and so now we have that and that all worked well i'm not sure why ghost didn't like these headings but it didn't so that's just a little little quirk of ghost but then there's some other stuff i can do that's pretty pretty advanced so i have some forms that i have to fill out and so basically i need to like say mark this as a feature put my name and then write a note that says testing complete i have a shortcut that lets me do that here's a crazy one that's kind of linking multiple actions together you saw earlier how i can go to a login page and i can just hit a keyboard shortcut to log in as that user well i can also do this so let's pretend this is a terminal i have this script that basically spits out a unique url but it takes me to just the same login page every time and so what i can do is i can hit my super keys and then t it's going to select the text it's going to open the login page that would be unique and then i get this pop-up that says who's logging in admin secondary or cancel so i'll do secondary and so it pastes in the name and i'm logged in as a secondary user and so again that's kind of one of these things where i go into i've got login user a right so this is the thing i showed you where it types the user tab types the password and hits return that just fills out the form and then this uh where is it um log into account here we go so this one it basically opens chrome if it's not already open this would be the terminal in my real work it does another find image it double clicks and drags so it double clicks at the center of this image which is the start of the url it drags 500 points to the right let's go and then copies it opens a new tab in chrome paste it into the address bar hits return to load the page that prompt comes up that says who's logging in it says admin secondary or cancel and that'll just cancel you out and then based on the result of that if you say admin then we log you in as admin and then i actually have a alert throwing here that says you did it congrats i don't need that so i'll just hit delete or it will log in as user b so you can do some if statements there's some really advanced stuff here there's also the ability to i like to load up some stats pages i like to see stats just at a glance and so i have my super keys and then s for statistics and it loads a few pages and i have it loading google analytics right here for a site as well as twitter analytics obviously these are going to be real things uh when i actually do it at work but it lets me pull up some dashboards super quickly and find information and yeah that's kind of all the things there's more obviously i can do so for example this is bold text and if i want to copy it i can obviously just do command c to copy to my system clipboard but maybe i want to do it as plain text and so then i have my super keys and then c and then it copies it and then i also have it throw a notification that says converted to plain text and then it shows me what i just copied so that makes me know that i have it as plain text in my clipboard so that is an awful lot again i didn't really show you how to do all of this none of it is super hard the things with like show my email super simple you just say when i type this i want it to insert this by typing super simple when i want to copy plain text which i just showed you i have the shortcut i wanted to run the system copy then i want it to set the system clipboard to text so it just takes clipboard and does it as text and then i show you a notification with whatever you just did so there's tons more you can do i didn't do a good job of showing you exactly what you can do but this hopefully gives you an idea of what's possible and some more real world examples of what you can do again this is a subset of what i have but i kind of have the system with like these super keys and then specific letters that always do the same thing that i think is pretty uh intuitive for me at least no one else will be able to sit down to this computer and figure it out but you can start to build out a system one thing at a time and that's super super nice but yeah that is it for me today thank you so much for watching you

Channel: A Better Computer

Views: 5,935

Keywords: productivity, tutorial, apple, tech news

Id: MbVJnTCSrK8

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021