I’ve been trying to get more information as part of my error handler and part of that would be to gather information about the OS itself similar to what we can get from the WinVer command.
Microsoft Windows 10 Home
Version 22H2 (OS Build 19045.5011)
Related to a recent question made to my VBA – Open a URL in FireFox/Chrome article and out of curiosity, I decided to figure out how one could determine which Web Browser was defined as the default web browser for a PC.
I went out digging and the information I was finding simply didn’t work when I tested it. Some posts were mentioning checking the
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\command\
and/or
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command\
registry key(s).
Some mentioned checking
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.html\UserChoice
but as I said, the returned values didn’t match my settings when I’d make changes to my default app.
So I kept digging.
So what is one to do then?
In my first part of this exploration of how to enable users to make color selections within a database, I demonstrated how we can use the built-in ChooseColor API dialog. This time round, I wanted to explore using an HTML color picker. Why, you might ask, well, I wanted to see what could be used that didn’t require APIs. Furthermore, I have seen many very good JavaScript color picker and simply wanted to have some fun!
Beside not needing to mess around with APIs, conditional compilation directives, … another advantage of this approach is the simple fact that since this is built upon plain HTML, JavaScript & CSS, we can make any changes we wish to the appearance of the dialog, unlike when using the built-in Windows ChooseColor API dialog approach.
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This is the first part, of a 2 part segment I’m working on, which explores how we can give user’s the ability to select colors within a database. In this post, I will go over using the ChooseColor API.
I though I’d break the code down into three versions:
So you pick which version of the code you wish to use.
I’ve been doing some work with Outlook recently and seeing postings to read signature files that have hard codes file names
sSig = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject").GetFile(Environ("appdata") & "\Microsoft\Signatures\MySignatureFile.htm").OpenAsTextStream(1, -2).ReadAll
Now this is great and all, but that means you need to know the name of the file and update it for each user, update it should they ever create a new one … a nightmare to manage!
So I set out to find a better way!
I’m not going to go on and on about it, but needless to say, Microsoft sure did not make thing easy for us developers and documentation about certain aspects appears, at least to me, to be non-existent. So it took some serious investigative work to figure out which registry keys were involved, … I so wish that Microsoft would standardize and cleanup their object models and gives us some desperately needed methods and properties, but if they haven’t by now I doubt I’ll ever see it since now all their energies are on the cloud!
The fact that even with the object available to me, I still have to go through the registry to get information is just mind blowing in 2020!
Moving on now.
The solution requires a few procedures:
One of my most popular posts is my function for sending e-mail using Outlook automation: VBA – Send HTML Emails Using Outlook Automation. That said, there is an issue with that code, the way I retain the signature in the generate e-mail.
Although this is the most common approach seen online (from what I have seen over the years); to concatenate the message we want to send with the existing body when the e-mail is first created:
.HTMLBody = sMyHTMLMessage & .HTMLBody
The issue being that .HTMLBody will already be a complete HTML document
<html ...> <head>...</head> <body ...> ... </body> </html>
and the concatenation is prepending the user’s message at the beginning, outside the html/body tags, resulting in
The User's Message is prepended here! <html ...> <head>...</head> <body ...> ... </body> </html>
which is simply incorrect HTML!
Now, some e-mail clients, such as Outlook, deal with this just fine, but this can cause issue for others. As such, I wanted to find a way to generate an HTML e-mail while creating proper HTML.
I was asked, on this blog, about how one could search the inbox for e-mails from a specific sender with a term in the subject and thought this could be a good post to help others rather than leaving the answer buried on a random post page as a comment.
The important thing to know is that Outlook has the Restrict Method which enables us to perform searches and retrieve just what we are looking for. Once you are aware of this, then it’s just a question of writing some code! (luckily for you, I’ve done that!)
Considering some recent work I’ve done and seeing questions in forums, I thought I’d quickly illustrate how easy it is to save and retrieve strings (text) from the clipboard.
There are several possible approaches for working with the Clipboard and I will explore 3 in this post:
Have you ever wanted to run a PowerShell command from within VBA and get back a value?
Before getting into returning a response, let first look at simply executing a command. There are many instances in which we simply want to run a PowerShell command and don’t need to get any response back.
It turns out that it is very easy to do and very similar to the approach taken in VBA – Get Host IP Address.
PowerShell can simply be called/executed from a standard command prompt using the command
powershell -command
Armed with this information when can simple use a WScript Shell object to execute the command, thus giving us a simple function along the lines of
I recently had to do some Outlook automation for a client and decided to automate some Outlook configuration which included the creation of Outlook Rules so I thought I’d post an example here in the hopes it might help others as I found it difficult to find good examples to learn from when I needed them.