Selenay's Ramblings

I'm hoping that someone on my f-list may be able to help out with this.

There are some Excel spreadsheets on a password protected website that I need to download and save each week. I have a username and password but I will not be the person who has to run this procedure each week. I'm hoping that there is some way, using VBA, that I can open and save (or just extract without opening...) the spreadsheet as part of a macro.

I was using the Workbook.Open method a couple of days ago and passing in a password, which worked perfectly. However, this morning I've run the code without changing anything and it's downloading blank workbooks even though I have checked on the site and the workbooks are nicely populated.

I am assuming that something has been changed on the server that is preventing what was working on Wednesday.

Does anyone have any bright ideas or am I going to have to install an FTP program (like WGet) on my target users' computers in order to get this file? In which case, it's probably going to be easier to get them to log into the website manually and download because persuading IT to install software is almost entirely impossible. I want to make this thing as simple as possible! One button to rule it all is my mantra with this project.

Any help that anyone can give would be much appreciated.

I wish there were a VBA community on LJ *sigh*

It's Friday! Woo!

Tomorrow I am destined for the bright lights and big bookshops of London on a day trip with Da :-) Intend to hit Waterstones in Picadilly and Foyles with lots of booktokens. If anyone has any recommendations...

*g*

I've got a list already of things that I'll be looking for :-)

For the Naomi Novik fans on my f-list, she's been nominated for the Hugo Best Novel and the John Campbell award, both for Temeraire. Woo! For the non-fans - why haven't you tried her books yet? ;-)

The important part of this post is a book recommendation request with a technical slant. Many of you may know than I have to use VBA extensively in my job (yes, yes, Microcrap sucks...) and we currently have no reference text except for my mad Googling skilz (TM). Obviously this isn't helpful for the newbies or for me when I can't get a search term that will actually provide useful results. So the boss has finally agreed to buy us a couple of reference texts for the department provided I can find some good ones.

Any suggestions? We mainly use VBA for Excel, so something with a focus on that would be most useful, but we also automate Outlook things from Excel and I'd like to see whether we can do some PowerPoint automation as well so it would be useful if some of that was covered. I'm not looking for a Learn in 24 Hours kind of thing, more of a reference that I can flick through when trying to figure out how to do the latest crazy thing I've been asked for.

With so many techies on my f-list, surely one of you has had to deal with VBA and can suggest something for me to look at?

I am a genius.

I have completed the current Really Big Project on the agreed delivery date. It includes lots of really complicated SQL embedded in Excel and run via VBA, exporting of files, programmatically adding VBA to some of the files to create print buttons, exporting some of the data as HTML (OK, I borrowed someone else's code and adapted it for that bit...), auto-emailing the files and only sending certain files to certain people with some emails containing plain text bodies and other pretty HTML bodies containing summary charts.

This was a seriously programming job and I'm really very pleased with the results, if I say so myself. Hence, I am a genius.

I also hinted to Da Boss that, should his dreams on some of our reporting be allowed, I am very open to the idea of being trained up in .Net so that I can be dream implementor. I'm not holding my breath on this one, but if I can get some .Net courses and practical work experience under my belt then that will be a very good thing for my CV :-)

In other news, busy weekend ahead OMG. One of those things is hopefully (bad back permitting) seeing Casino Royale, so I'm not complaining *g* And I had the time to sit and read a bit of fic last night, including a couple of ones that have already been reviewed. Hopefully I'll have a few new reviews up before Christmas so that I don't have to worry about having no ideas Christmas fic and therefore not joining in with the seasonal giving concept.