In Eye and Pen, many things can be activated via a keyboard shortcut.

You can link menus to custom keyboard shortcuts (menu Display / Shortcuts).

The left panel shows menu entries names  (you may unfold menus to show sub-menus).  The right panel lists available shortcuts and those already used.

Buttons in the center area can be clicked to associate / deasssociate a menu with a shortcut.

You will see that using the keyboard is faster than moving a mouse cursor and clicking, especially when using sub-menus.

In dialog boxes, you can activate a button pressing the ALT key and the underlined letter in the button’s caption. For example, ALT + s for “save”.

Eye and Pen works with a single protocol (file) at a time. To save time, one shoud industrialize actions as much as possible, i.e. try to find which actions can be automatically repeated on a bunch of files.
Let’s take a simple example. 2 groups of 25 participants wrote two texts each. Then, we have got 100 protocols (files) to process.
If we wish to export the pauses data of theses productions (for analyse into a statistical analyses software or a spreadsheet), this means repeating a 100 times the same operation “open a file”, select menu Extractions, sub-menu Pauses, then give a file name, click on Save.
This is time and energy that can be better used,  for other tasks for example.
What if someone else can do it for you ?
This is the point where EPKeys comes in.
EPKeys is a kind of robot that “blindly” repeats an action. You tell it what to do (what keyboard key presses it has to produce) and on which folder’s content.
EPKeys can repeat almost any keypress you can do in Eye and Pen. Thus, you may use it to repeat actions other than data extractions, such as filtering, fixations building, words separation, etc.

EPKeys is a “tool” software delivered with Eye and Pen. Its function is to send series of keyboard key presses into Eye and Pen, instead of you.

Thus you may proceed to massive data extraction. A tutorial is available here:

A demo in video is available here: https://videotheque.univ-poitiers.fr/video.php?id=tz1k5kmw5cm2jxhpjsvh&link=l3112m12s5vm4qjxxtdphc6az66v4p

To industrialize data extractions, depending on what will be done next, there is two ways: either extract the data of each protocol into a separate file, or extract all data into a single file  (see Extractions/Preferences/General to allow adding into an existing file).
If willing to directly build a single data matrix, then the better way is to extract all into a single file, and that’s it.

But, on the other hand, if you need to retrieve specific data from results, it may be more handy to create a result file for each protocol, then retrieve these specific data with MakeGroup, to produce a single matrix. This may avoid to have to write macro in a spreadsheet or so.

Let’s take an example.
A task was to write two words, amongst which, only the second is of interest. Specifically, we’re intrested in the trade-off between tracing time and pausing time within this word. Words have been written into “slots”, thus are physically well separated.
The most time saving method is then to use EPKEYS to automatically “separate words”, next extract “tracing dynamics” data, one result file per protocol.
Finally, using MakeGroupe, row and columns of interest can be automatically picked-up in each file to create  new single result file containing a ready-to-be-analysed matrix.

MakeGroup is an utility software that allows to retrieve lines, columns or even cells within one or more Eye and Pen extraction data files to group data.

Maybe a little more easy to use than writing macros into a spreadsheet ?

You may find it in the Download section of this site.