Owner

I'm a programmer, experienced in application development and coding, but a rank beginner to VB. I need someone I can ask questions of about VBA for Excel and Access. I'm mostly self-taught and I learn quickly, so I probably won't need highly detailed explanations. Mostly my questions would be like "How, in general, does one do X in VBA?" and then I could probably figure out the details myself. Ideally I'd like someone who I could consult with on an ongoing basis by telephone or email (although I don't know if that kind of arrangement would fit in with the auction structure here.) Following is my initial question, along with the programming task that prompted it: How does one run a system command (or "shell escape") from within VB? Is this possible from within VBA? The programming task that prompted this is as follows: I want to feed data from Excel worksheets into another application, in batches. The simplest way to do this (from the standpoint of the other application) is via space-delimited data (although CSV-formatted data would also work.) It's obviously easy to write a macro that will save the data from one worksheet to a space-delimited *.prn file. However, I want to save data from several worksheets before it's processed by the other application (in a batch.) If Excel's "Save As ..." command had a flag for _appending_ its output to a file, that would solve my problem. But that doesn't seem to be an option. Presumably it'd be pretty simple to write VB code that would append to a file, but I don't know how to write this in VB, and I'm not sure I want to bother learning, just for this task. So the simplest thing for me would be to do the "Save As ...", followed by a system command that would append the newly-created file to the target file. (If the above sounds like the thinking of someone more used to working in Unix than in Microsoft apps ... it is ... :-) ## Deliverables If you want to bid on this "job" (more consulting than programming), my requirements are to comment on the above, specifically the following: - are shell excapes possible from within Excel, and if so, how; - if not, how could I get a unique filename for each *.prn file created by several instances of "Save As ..."; - or would it be simple enough in your opinion to just write the VB code that will take the contents of the Excel cells and append them to the target file. I realize that these are not exactly tight specifications, so I suppose a certain amount of trust is required on your part, that I'll be satisfied with a reasonable depth of knowledge. On the other hand, if you already know this stuff, it won't take much of your time to tell me about it, particularly since I'd be glad to accept a reply via phone (toll-free from the US or Canada.) And if we find it easy to work together in this way, I'll need other similar help in the future, and will possibly even have some small jobs to contract out. Any help appreciated, all bids considered. ## Platform Win 98 or above; Excel 97 or Excel 2000