Using mouse clicks as inputs for neuroscience experiment?

[NeuroSpace]

Hello everyone!

I'm a complete VBA noob and I'm looking for a way to use Excel macros to allow me to do a neuroscience experiment for my graduate course.

What I need is simple, but I don't know how to execute it or whether it is possible at all, so I was wondering if you guys could help me out.

For my experiment, subjects will be turning around in a special chair with their eyes closed, and will tell me when they think they moved a quarter turn. I thought it would be neat to have a way of recording their input with a wireless mouse attached to the spinning chair.
So basically what I need is a way for, say, left mouse clicks to consecutively input a timestamp in a column in Excel.

Does it make any sense to do this in Excel?

Please if you have any questions fire away!

 

[Jaafar Tribak]

trapping the left mouse clicks is better but harder to code - A simpler solution is to trap the Right mouse clicks via the native Worksheet BeforeRightClick event

Something like along these lines maybe :

Right click the active worksheet tab , select View Code and place the following in the worksheet module white pane :

Private Sub Worksheet_BeforeRightClick(ByVal Target As Range, Cancel As Boolean)
    Cancel = True
    Cells(Rows.Count, 1).End(xlUp).Offset(1) = Format(Now, "HH:MM:SS")
End Sub

 

[mikerickson]

Alternatly, you could use a userform (no controls) and the MouseDown event.

 

[NeuroSpace]

Mike, thank you for your feedback, I will look into your suggestion as a back up option.

trapping the left mouse clicks is better but harder to code - A simpler solution is to trap the Right mouse clicks via the native Worksheet BeforeRightClick event
[/CODE]

Jaafar, thank you very much, this gets the job pretty much done!

It has one tiny flaw though: a cell needs to be clicked in order for the event to occur. So if the pointer moves accidentally then I would loose a data point. To get around this, I thought of using software that allows mapping of keystroke combination to mouse clicks.

How could then the code be slightly modified so as to be activated by a specific keyboard combination (which would in turn be assigned to a mouse click)?

Thanks!