RoboIntern has a mountain of potential, but there’s no room to really do it justice here.

The other two features we really like allow you to generate emails automatically and offer automated report creation. One that will get plenty of people excited is the ability to automatically import data from Excel into Access. So what can you do? First of all, RoboIntern can dig right into the main Microsoft Office apps and perform operations. Technically it’s donationware, but at the time of writing the donations page was not yet up and running. RoboIntern is so clever, it’s hard to believe that the program is completely free. There’s also a scripting option so that you can program complex operations to fit your very specific needs. It can also do a bunch of neat stuff with emails, file management and ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) databases.

Unlike a general-purpose task scheduler, RoboIntern is specifically designed to automate tasks in Excel, Access and Word. RoboIntern (Free)Īs the name suggests, RoboIntern is a software package that aims to automate the daily productivity grind. It’s fairly easy to use, is a great drop-in replacement for the Windows Task Scheduler and most users probably don’t have to pay for the fancy version. You can start software at any predetermined time, run them with specific parameters and then stop them when the job is done. Z-Cron can do pretty much what you expect a Windows task scheduler should. If you have multiple workstations which need the same set of automated tasks, such as backups, you can set up one and then use Task Till Dawn’s export function to easily copy it to any other machine. Even better, you can transfer many of the same workflows between the two versions of the app. Task Till Dawn is a completely free Windows Task Scheduler alternative that’s actually available for both Windows and macOS.

If you want more esoteric options (such as running something at random times) you’ll have to pay for the professional edition, but we think most people are going to be just fine with the basic package. Starting from running once a minute all they way up to running once a year. Schedule frequency is also comprehensive. These include some pretty useful ones such as the computer being idle, it not being idle or when a certain hot key is pressed. There’s also plenty of flexibility with the various schedule types that can trigger actions when certain conditions arise.

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