Am I the last in the world to know about this? What a great tool!  How often do you stare at a run control you are about to set up, or a configuration screen, knowing you are about to devote an hour or more of your time to creating new entries?  Or, your on row 86 of 230 repetitious tasks and your head is beginning to do the ‘bob and nod’.  Enter iMacros (http://wiki.imacros.net/Community_Editions), a free browser add-on that automates almost any task and away you go!

My current client adds 8-10 departments per month, and 5-10 projects per day into their PeopleSoft system.  Now the superuser has set up iMacros for each and runs them from an excel workbook as the additions come in.  She sits back reads her magazine while new data is loaded.  For an end-user, who doesn’t want to understand the intricacies of Excel-to-CI, this can be a simple end around for many monotonous tasks.

For testing it can take on larger meaning, as we develop scripting to load test data, and set up new configuration.  And it’s so easy to learn.

But we decide what is right, and what is an illusion.