Some Hotkeys for ACBLscore

Toward the end of a session, the scoring desk can become a fairly hectic place.  Players are asking for printouts of Summaries or Rankings, while the director is dealing with the posting of Leader Charts and possible last-minute score-corrections as well.

Two mouse/key sequences frequently used at this time can easily be tweaked so as to make the director's life easier — namely, display of a Leaders Chart and the printing of Player Summaries.  The solutions are effected by the fabulous utility AutoHotkeys, which not only is free, but is transparent to the user once it has been installed.

AutoHotkeys  simply enables a key of one's choice to substitute for one or more mouse actions or other keystrokes.  The included script sets up two highly useful hotkeys:

• [F12] facilitates the printing of Summaries by replacing three tedious mouse-clicks on [Reports, Summaries, Enter].  A single keypress takes one directly to the little dialog-box that asks for a player's direction or pair number.
• [Insert] displays the Section Leaders, replacing [F8, Enter, Enter].
  This assumes that the director wishes to display the leaders on the Screen and in Rank Order.

Using [F12] was an easy choice, because that is the only Function Key not already assigned by ACBLscore.  [Insert] was an arbitrary selection of a handy unused key.

Be aware that these tools do not interfere in any manner with the normal functions of other keys.  Using them is optional, and they are operational only when the Main Page of ACBLscore  is the Active Window.

HOTKEY SETUP

Download the AutoHotkeys  program here:  AUTOHOTKEY.ZIP     This file is safe!

Unzip the folder and place it wherever you like.  For example purposes, I have specified C:\AutoHotkey.  The program need not be registered in Windows.  These are the contents of the folder:

Select the executable file that matches your OS (most likely AutoHotkeyU64.exe for a 64-bit system).  For my examples, I have renamed it simply to AutoHotkey.exe.

If you like, click on the executable to peruse the extensive, well-written Help File.  Assuming, however, that you will not be compiling scripts of your own, all program files can be deleted excepting these two:

Create a Shortcut to the executable file, and edit its Properties thusly:

That tells the executable file to run the following simple script:

This utility is best-configured to [Run at Startup].  If yours is a single-user system, place the Shortcut in this directory:

C:\ ProgramData \ Microsoft \ Windows \ Start Menu \ Programs \ Startup

Optional: if you have a multi-user setup, then a Shortcut for each user could be copied to this folder:

C:\ Users \ %USERNAME% \ AppData \ Roaming \ Microsoft \ Windows \ Start Menu \ Programs \ Startup

This admittedly is an esoteric consideration; but without the individual files, the hotkeys would disappear if one were to switch logins without restarting Windows.

That's it!  Enjoy your new HotKeys.  We love them at the Sacramento Bridge Center.

If your club has a multiple-monitor setup and you wish to transfer data via graphic images, then a couple more useful hotkeys could easily be added to the existing script.  A real human would be happy to respond to an email; but before doing that, it would be best to read this page:  [Using Multiple Monitors with ACBLscore]