Abstract: An intelligent, state-based macro facility is provided (as opposed to the unintelligent keystroke macro facilities typical of the prior art). Instead of a record time and an end time, an intelligent, state-based macro, or "smart macro," has only a single "capture" time, determined by the user pressing a single "smart macro" key. The state of the application, including objects displayed and various properties or attributes of those objects, is then captured and stored under a name supplied by the user. That same state may then be applied to different data to produce the same kinds of results. The smart macro may be applied interactively by the user to different data, or different data sets. Even more advantageously, a batch job may be scheduled, in which the smart macro is scheduled to run on specified data at a specified time with the results being saved to disk under a user-specified name. Batch jobs may be scheduled as one-time jobs or recurring jobs.