GetWindowText – Extract Text From Application Windows

GetWindowText is a free tool which can extract text from application windows and controls where it’s normally very difficult to access. You wanted to record exactly which languages a program supported. This might normally be held in a drop-down list box, so you click an arrow to its right, and the list expands. Windows provides no standard way to extract the contents of that list box, though, so you’ll have to manually read them, and then retype every language in another document.

Download GetWindowText 

With GetWindowText, though, all you have to do is launch the program, hold down a button, and drag it to the list box. You’ll see an outline appear around the list when it’s in the right place; you can then release the button and the list of languages (or whatever else it contains) will appear in a standard text box, which you can then copy to the clipboard and paste wherever you like.

GetWindowText doesn’t always work, unfortunately, and its failures seem fairly random. It dragged and dropped the button onto the left-hand pane of an Explorer window, for instance, and saw the correct tree view text. It dropped it onto the right-hand pane, though, and saw nothing at all.