Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Copying text out of (almost) any dialog

Suppose a program throws up a big warning dialog with a whole bunch of text that that you want to save but don't care to fully transcribe. (Office does this sometimes.) And, unlike some system messages, Ctrl+C doesn't copy the message to the clipboard.

If you want to get text out of these applications, you can use the Inspect tool from the Windows SDK. (The only important part here of that bundle is the Windows Software Development Kit component.) The tool gets dropped into here, or a slight permutation thereof:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\x64\inspect.exe

Use the Watch Cursor mode (the pointer icon in the toolbar) to select the target object by hovering your mouse over it for a moment. When Inspect's main pane updates, disable that mode to reduce the chance of accidentally deadlocking the tool - which is surprisingly easy - then you'll see a whole bunch of information. In that list you should find some property or another that contains the text, which you can copy as normal.

Based on my Super User answer.

No comments:

Post a Comment