A free macro recorder for Windows with readable steps

Macro by Zaweba is a free macro recorder for Windows. You press Ctrl+Alt+R from any program, do the job once, and it records your clicks, drags, scrolling and typing along with the time between them. The recording turns into plain English steps you can read and fix, and you can replay it whenever you like.

It is free software under the Zaweba licence agreement, which is asked once on first start. There is no account and no cloud, and nothing leaves your PC unless you choose Send feedback from the Help menu.

What you get without paying

Plenty of macro tools ask you to learn a scripting language before they do anything useful. This one is built for people who find that too technical. A finished recording reads like a short list of instructions: Click left at 512, 300, then Type "hello", then Key Ctrl+S, then Wait 500 ms. Ordinary typing becomes a single Type step, shortcuts become Key steps and several wheel notches merge into one Scroll step, so the list stays short.

Replays are flexible. You can choose 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x or No delays, repeat a set number of times, keep going until stopped, or run once per row of a CSV or TXT file. Each macro can have its own hotkey, such as Ctrl+Alt+1, and the app refuses a hotkey that clashes with another macro or another program and tells you why.

Recording your first macro

Open the app and press the Record button, or press Ctrl+Alt+R wherever you are. The main window gets out of the way and a small bar at the top of the screen counts the events as they are captured. It has buttons for Pause keystrokes and Stop, and clicks on the bar itself are never recorded, so you won't end up with a stray step.

Do the job slowly and deliberately, the way you'd show it to someone. When you finish, press Stop. Your steps appear in the editor straight away, and everything saves as you go.

A warning appears before the first recording: typed text, including passwords, is stored as plain text. If a job involves a password, press the pause hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+P by default) before typing it. The macro gets a note where keys were not recorded, and clicks are still kept.

Playing it back safely

Press Play, press F5 or use the macro's hotkey. A countdown of 3 seconds by default appears first. It never takes the focus and clicks go straight through it, so you have time to click into the window the macro should work in.

If anything goes wrong, hold Esc for one second. That stops any replay in any program at any speed and lets go of any key or mouse button the macro was holding. Quick taps of Esc and Esc presses inside the macro are ignored, so a macro that uses Esc can still run.

Making it fit your job

The step editor lets you add clicks, double-clicks, typing, key combinations, waits, scrolls, moves, button presses and releases and notes by hand. Enter or a double-click edits a step, Alt+Up and Alt+Down move it, Ctrl+D duplicates it and Del removes it. To set a position you can type it or point at the spot; the editor reads the cursor after three seconds.

Turn on positions relative to the active window and clicks are measured from the corner of the window you were working in, so the macro still lands in the right place after that window moves. You can switch each step separately, which helps when part of a job happens somewhere fixed such as the taskbar.

For repeated data entry, a Type from list step types one row of a CSV or TXT file on each loop, either the whole row with Tab between columns or a single column. It copes with quotes, commas inside quotes, semicolon files, a header row and UTF-8, and the replay ends cleanly when the list runs out.

Is a free recorder enough?

For filling forms, repeating menu clicks, renaming things one after another or typing the same details into the same boxes, a recorder with readable steps is usually all you need. Where a job needs decisions, such as doing something different when a box is empty, a recorder can't think for you, and you should keep that part by hand.

Macros are saved as .zmacro files, plain JSON in your Macro folder, and File > Import and Export move them to another PC. For unattended runs, ZawebaMacro.exe --play plays a macro from the command line, and Schedule by Zaweba uses that to run macros on a timetable.

Start with something small that annoys you every day. Record it, read the steps, replay it at 1x while you watch, and only then speed it up.