4 Tools For Helping You Automate on Windows

Power Automate — Power Automate is a visual no code tool from Microsoft and can tightly integrate into Windows functionality and Microsoft’s Office apps, although it’s not limited to Microsoft only applications and services.

Although nowhere near as broad this is an automation service that is like some cloud services such as IFTTT but is locally based too on your Windows computer. It’s the nearest equivalent to Shortcuts or Automator on the Mac.

AutoHotKey — The nearest equivalent to Mac is probably KeyboardMaestro. This open source free automation tool has been around a long time (although it’s constantly updated). There’s not much you can’t do with Autohotkey and in fact forms the basis of my custom “focus modes/context computing” on my own Window machine.

You can interact with applications and perform any kind of task you can think of. The drawback is that it’s all in a scripting language. You don’t need to develop any deep programming skills but it does require some effort to get into and a lot of looking up to do things.

TriggerCMD — You can think of this as a type of automation bridge. You can install this app and trigger it remotely online, it even has a Zapier action. You can set to trigger any sort of pre-defined action set up on the app (which is also an online service).

The actions are a little limited at least in ease of setting up multiple things. I personally like to simply make the actions to run an AutoHotkey script.

TextExpander — The automation this handles is text replacement and form filling, it’s more popular on the Mac but that’s one reason to pick this over other text replacement tools in that it’s cross platform.

If you have other devices that aren’t Windows it’s a good choice to keep all your snippets (text replacement rules) synced across everything.

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