How to Use TinyTask From a Standing Start

There is nothing to install. You download one file and run it.

No setup wizard, no administrator prompt, no folder full of components. Put the file somewhere sensible, in your documents or on a USB stick, and double-click it. Get it from the download page, where the size and checksum are published so you can confirm you have the genuine file.

The window that opens is small. That is not a loading state. That is the program.

Left to right: Open, Save, Rec, Play, .exe, Prefs.

Open loads a saved recording. Save stores the one in memory. Rec starts and stops recording. Play replays what is in memory. .exe turns the recording into a standalone program. Prefs opens a menu of settings.

Two things about this toolbar catch people out.

There is no Stop button. Rec is a toggle. The same button starts and ends a recording.

Play is greyed out until there is something to play. If it looks disabled, nothing is in memory yet.

Six steps. Read them all before you start, because step two is the one people skip.

One. Get the screen ready. Open the application you want to automate and put it where you want it. Anything you set up now is not part of the recording, which is exactly what you want.

Two. Decide how you will stop. You can press Rec again with the mouse, or press the record hotkey. The hotkey is better, because moving the mouse to the toolbar gets recorded and the hotkey does not. The default is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R and the options are on the hotkeys page.

Three. Press Rec and do the task. Work at a normal pace. The title bar turns into a counter while it records.

Four. Stop the recording. Press the hotkey, or click Rec again. The counter disappears.

Five. Put the screen back and press Play. This part matters. Return everything to how it looked when you pressed record, then play. Watch it run.

While it plays, the title bar shows the time and, in brackets, which pass it is on. That bracket is how you tell a loop from a single run at a glance.

Six. Save it if it worked. Press Save and give it a name. Nothing is saved automatically.

Understanding this one thing removes most of the frustration people have with the program.

It records where your mouse moved, where you clicked, which keys you pressed, and how long you waited between all of it. Timing is part of the recording, which is why playback looks like a person rather than a burst of activity.

It records positions, not targets. It knows you clicked a point on the screen. It does not know you clicked a Save button. Nothing in the recording understands what any window is or what any button does.

It ignores everything else. It cannot see what is on screen. It cannot tell whether a page loaded, whether a dialog appeared, or whether the last click did anything at all. It cannot make a decision, wait for something, or take a different path.

That is the whole design, and it explains every limitation on this site. The program is a very good replayer and it is not, in any sense, thinking.

Press Save, choose a folder, and give the file a name that says what it does.

Two habits worth forming immediately.

Save before you experiment. Recording something else replaces what is in memory, with no warning and no undo.

Do not double-click your saved recordings. The program does not register its own file type. Windows hands the file to whichever other application claimed that extension, and that one cannot read it. Always use the Open button. The rec files page covers this fully.

Press Pause or ScrollLock. Break works too.

You will need this. Everybody needs it eventually, usually the first time they try a loop. The keys work without the window in focus, and there is a full page on the awkward cases at stop playback, including keyboards that have no Pause key.

Before you press play on anything long, put a finger on that key. It costs nothing and it saves the afternoon.

Everything the program can be configured to do is in one menu.

Playback speed, from half up to very fast, plus a custom value. Loop count and continuous playback. Both hotkeys. Always on top, captions and the toolbar image.

Each of those has its own page: playback speed and loops are the two you will reach for first.

There is nothing hidden behind that menu. No advanced panel, no second window. What you see there is the complete set of options.

Five, in the order people hit them.

Recording the mouse travelling to the toolbar. You press Rec with the mouse, do your task, then move back to the toolbar to stop. That journey is now part of your macro. Use the hotkey instead.

Expecting a pause. There is no pause during recording. Pressing the record hotkey again ends it. If you make a mistake halfway through, start again.

Pressing Play with nothing recorded. You get a dialog telling you so.

Forgetting to reset the screen before playing. The macro starts from wherever you happen to be. If that is not where you were when you recorded, every click lands somewhere else.

Testing at high speed. Record, then play at normal speed first. Speed is where working macros go to break.

Four habits separate a macro you use once from one you use for months. This is the part of how to use TinyTask that nobody writes down.

Maximise the window before recording. A maximised window sits in a predictable place. A restored one moves.

Start from a known state. Record the macro opening the application itself rather than assuming a window is already there.

Prefer keys to clicks. Keyboard steps do not depend on screen position, so they survive resolution and scaling changes that break clicks. This is the single most useful technique on this page.

Leave gaps. Wait a moment after any action that makes the screen change. Your pause is recorded, and on playback it gives the application time to catch up.

If a macro still misbehaves, the not working page covers the causes in order of likelihood, including the ones that cannot be fixed.

Once your macro works, there are two directions.

Share it or run it without the program. Press .exe and you get a standalone file that runs anywhere, no installation needed. The compile to EXE page covers what carries over and what does not.

Run it repeatedly. Set a loop count and let it work. Keep the stop key under a finger the first time.

If it works on your machine and fails on another, the cause is nearly always display scaling, which the Windows 11 page explains.