find image on the screen and click on it

For automating external applications, as an easy fast (and temporary) way to find and click on certain elements, it would be useful to have some handy VBA functions that:

1) find a given bitmap on the screen
2) move the mouse on (the center of) it
3) left click

What libraries should I look at, to create these functions?

Could you explain a little better what you are trying to do. Do you have a program running and you want to push a button on it automatically? I used AutoIT to do this. I also had to push a button on a graphic image. I did a screen capture of the screen using a command line tool called from VBA and did a search using a tool called Imagemagick (free, command line). It has a subimage search capability. Took a moment to figure it out but the forum is excellent. I remember it taking several seconds to find subimage. If it is a webpage there are better solutions.

Exactly, I used AutoIT and ImageSearch (see link1 and link2) in the past and I'd love to recreate the same in VBA that is my new preferred language

There is no direct support in VBA. You'll need to use 3rd party tools and call them from VBA.

But what you can do, with difficulty, is find a button or other control in another applications window and click, mouse down or whatever on it. This is not beginner coding as it will involve extensive use of the Windows API. This depends on another application hosting child controls so am not sure what you mean by 'image'

This, for example, is a VB sample to click a button in a known window. It first finds the Window from it's caption, then searches the child controls of that Window for a button with the caption "OK" and finally sends a Click event to the button. This is by far the simplest example I could find but it is Visual Basic not VBA so will have to be rewritten and that'll be a challenge in itself, but the basics are there.

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Originally Posted by cytop

But what you can do, with difficulty, is find a button or other control in another applications window and click, mouse down or whatever on it. This is not beginner coding as it will involve extensive use of the Windows API. This depends on another application hosting child controls so am not sure what you mean by 'image'

Yes I know but it's much more difficult and not always possible to find the control of an element.

What I mean is that I'd like to give to VBA a little screenshot of something (a button or any other thing) that I want to click and let it find the coordinate of it on the screen.
I wonder for example if there's a Windows API for that, or a way to use the nice third-party ImageSearch DLL used in AutoIT for that...

Originally Posted by 6diegodiego9

I'd like to give to VBA a little screenshot of something (a button or any other thing) that I want to click and let it find the coordinate of it on the screen.

VBA works better with objects it can identify not a raw stream of bytes. Other than that, sorry, I really can't suggest anything.