I want to use VBA in Access to launch a seperate program. An example is that if a command button is pressed it would open up a specific Word document. It doesn't have to be word just any outside program. Does anyone have any suggestions.

Thank
Mike

Hi Mike,

The Shell function is a quick way to open an execuatable from VBA. The following functions open a document in Wordpad, Notepad, and Word respectively.

' Call OpenWordPad("c:\document.rtf")
Public Function OpenWordPad(strFile As String)
     Dim x As Variant
    'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\write.exe
    x = Shell("write.exe " & strFile, 1)
End Function

' Call OpenNotePad("C:\document.txt")
Public Function OpenNotePad(strFile As String)
     Dim x As Variant
    'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\notepad.exe
    x = Shell("notepad.exe " & strFile, 1)
End Function

' Call OpenWord("C:\document.doc")
Public Function OpenWord(strFile As String)
     Dim x As Variant
    'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\WINWORD.exe
    x = Shell("WINWORD.exe " & strFile, 1)
End Function

The windowstyle argument value of 1 is the value of the vbNormalFocus constant. See the online help for other constant values.

HTH,

Bob

That deffinatly helps but I think that I want to open up the snapshot viewer as opposed to any of those other programs you have listed. i'm running into a problem trying to get the OpenSnap function to work because it can't seem to find SnapView.exe. Is there another .exe I should be using. Here is my code.


 Call OpenSnap("h:\Snapshots\TempSnap.snp")
Public Function OpenSnap(strFile As String)
     Dim x As Variant
    'C:\Program Files\Snapshot Viewer\SNAPVIEW.exe
    x = Shell("SNAPVIEW.exe " & strFile, 1)
End Function

I also tried changing
 x = Shell("SNAPVIEW.exe " & strFile, 1)
to
 x = Shell("C:\Program Files\Snapshot Viewer\SNAPVIEW.exe " & strFile, 1)
But that didn't work.

Any help would be appreciated.

Not quite sure why:

doesn't work, unless "h:\Snapshots\TempSnap.snp" can't be found or accessed. It works fine on my end.

You do want to specify the path as you have, or Shell just looks for the exe along paths specified by the PATH Environment Variable in your system settings, which include (by default) %SystemRoot%\system32 (typically C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32) and %SystemRoot% (typically C:\WINDOWS).

Try:

in case ther is a typo or something involved somewhere. I had no problem with:

Bob