Chromatography Forum

Hello good morning, good afternoon to some people and good night to other people.

I have noticed in this forum there are still many chromatographers who still use the MSD Chemstation although Masshunter already exists. As a survey My question is: Do you think it is a lost effort to study how to make macros in MSD Chemstation?

Henrylozano wrote:
Hello good morning, good afternoon to some people and good night to other people.

I have noticed in this forum there are still many chromatographers who still use the MSD Chemstation although Masshunter already exists. As a survey My question is: Do you think it is a lost effort to study how to make macros in MSD Chemstation?

There are still quite a few 5971/72/73/75 units out there in operation that are probably all still using MSDChemstation, so it may still be useful. I haven't looked to see if there are any macros to be used in Mass Hunter yet, but I would much prefer MSDChemstation to Mass Hunter for data analysis. MH might be good for a research project, but for routine analysis with large analyte lists ( like EPA 8270 or 8260) it is very cumbersome to use.

James_Ball wrote:

Henrylozano wrote:
Hello good morning, good afternoon to some people and good night to other people.

I have noticed in this forum there are still many chromatographers who still use the MSD Chemstation although Masshunter already exists. As a survey My question is: Do you think it is a lost effort to study how to make macros in MSD Chemstation?

There are still quite a few 5971/72/73/75 units out there in operation that are probably all still using MSDChemstation, so it may still be useful. I haven't looked to see if there are any macros to be used in Mass Hunter yet, but I would much prefer MSDChemstation to Mass Hunter for data analysis. MH might be good for a research project, but for routine analysis with large analyte lists ( like EPA 8270 or 8260) it is very cumbersome to use.

Hi James, how nice to read you, I tell you, I also worked as a field support engineer for the Agilent representative brand in my country. In addition to the macro book found on the web, do you consider that another book for macros is required?

Henrylozano wrote:

James_Ball wrote:

Henrylozano wrote:
Hello good morning, good afternoon to some people and good night to other people.

I have noticed in this forum there are still many chromatographers who still use the MSD Chemstation although Masshunter already exists. As a survey My question is: Do you think it is a lost effort to study how to make macros in MSD Chemstation?

There are still quite a few 5971/72/73/75 units out there in operation that are probably all still using MSDChemstation, so it may still be useful. I haven't looked to see if there are any macros to be used in Mass Hunter yet, but I would much prefer MSDChemstation to Mass Hunter for data analysis. MH might be good for a research project, but for routine analysis with large analyte lists ( like EPA 8270 or 8260) it is very cumbersome to use.

Hi James, how nice to read you, I tell you, I also worked as a field support engineer for the Agilent representative brand in my country. In addition to the macro book found on the web, do you consider that another book for macros is required?

I have never seen another book on the macros. I know at one time Agilent offered a class on the macro programming so maybe there were some Agilent reference books for that class, but I don't know how to get one. Possibly someone here has taken the class and has other material they can share.

I was, and still am a "computer idiot". However, I was able to make some data analysis macros for our 5971 software to provide Retention Index in place of CAS number when doing automated search of our TIC peaks. We had previously made our own specialized fragrance library (took over a year) and had entered in retention index data for each known.

I first made a copy of the original macro using a different name, then adjusted what lines I needed, and then copied that in with the original file name, and tried to see if it worked.

I think someone in a different department who was better at computer helped us with a macro to list all the data in our custom library either by Entry Number or by alphabetic order.

No, I never took the HP Macro training class, would've been over my head. But there was an HP booklet on writing macros, so at that time it was somewhat expected that some would write macros. I think as cGMP became more involved, that some of this was way more difficult and complicated.

KM-USA wrote:
I was, and still am a "computer idiot". However, I was able to make some data analysis macros for our 5971 software to provide Retention Index in place of CAS number when doing automated search of our TIC peaks. We had previously made our own specialized fragrance library (took over a year) and had entered in retention index data for each known.

I first made a copy of the original macro using a different name, then adjusted what lines I needed, and then copied that in with the original file name, and tried to see if it worked.

I think someone in a different department who was better at computer helped us with a macro to list all the data in our custom library either by Entry Number or by alphabetic order.

No, I never took the HP Macro training class, would've been over my head. But there was an HP booklet on writing macros, so at that time it was somewhat expected that some would write macros. I think as cGMP became more involved, that some of this was way more difficult and complicated.

So do you think that is very difficult?

Henrylozano wrote:
So do you think that is very difficult?

Remember: learning what a mouse was and what Windows 286 was, with that 5971A software was difficult for me ! I had never heard of either before.

That Windows 286 had "MS-DOS Executive, before File Manager.

Quick question/point - I see MassHunter has quite a number of scripts which I'd say replaces the need for the macros of ChemStation - are they written in the same ChemStation macro language or something else?

I think some of the stuff for MassHunter uses HTML, I know the methods and data are stored as that.

MassHunter scripts use c# or Python programming languages which are much more widely known and practical languages than the macro programming language built into Chemstation- their usage within Masshunter allows for almost limitless customization.

While there are still quite a few labs using Chemstation, its macro programming language is outdated cumbersome at best, so I would only spend significant time learning it if you really really need it. There's an old macro programming guide for chemstation from 1995 that is still applicable (yes, it's that old...) on Agilent's website:

https://www.agilent.com/cs/library/user ... MACROS.PDF

Many thanks.

I googled some code snippets from their scripts and thought it was C# (or powershell).

Agree re: the redundancy of learning the ChemStation macro language. I've been avoiding it by using VBA but it would be nice to have some more direct control. I've only just changed over to MassHunter so am still learning the ropes.