I have a old Fortran based application where I calculate thermodynamic properties. It runs in a window, but is definitly not window complient (menu driven, but has short cuts like Ctl + Ins to copy, Shft + Ins to paste)
The interface/output from this application are text files
The only ouput is a Txt file - 265 pages long
The input files are also Txt files, where I change parameters to vary what will be calculated - after which I "run" the program and it generates the output text files


So I built a excel spreadsheet to pull the text files and convert them into spreadsheets -where I can analyse the data:)
I also wrote macros to take data from my Excell files and rewrite the input text files:)

I would like to go the next step, and get Excel to
Open this application
Open a specific file
Run the file
and close

 I realise I can use a hyperlink to start the application, but even when I register the input files with the application, the application starts without the input files..... so I think I have to magically control the application from with excel (someway)

Can anyone point in a direction to learn how to do this

Have a look at VBA 'Shell' and 'SendKeys' in Help. They contain an example using Calculator. We need to include Wait statements in the code to allow time for things to happen on screen because the code runs too fast otherwise.
eg. for 1 second code is
Wait Now +TimeValue("00:00:01")


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Regards BrianB
Most problems occur from starting at the wrong place.
Use a cup of coffee to make Windows run faster.
It is easy until you know how.