Visual Basic Lookup

[sockit2em]

Hi. I have almost no idea about Visual Basic (but I will have to learn a little bit for the following task, I think!):

 

I have an Excel spreadsheet with names and other information, let's say First Name, Last Name, Country and Height. What I want is to be able to run a Macro or something in Outlook's compose window and a prompt box should be displayed to the user. The user types in the name of a person (First name and Last name), preferably all in one, and then the spreadsheet is searched through and all the information for that person: their name, country and height - are inserted into the email, perhaps in a table.

The program would also need to check with the user if more than one person with that name is found, which one they want (eg. "Do you want the John Smith who lives in New York?", and if not, "Do you want the John Smith who lives in Texas?", etc.).

 

Does anyone know of anything like this, have any ideas how something like this could be programmed or have any other tips?

Thanks very much. 

[cmgmyr]

You can do this with VB. I would suggest going and checking out google groups. There are a lot of VB boards on there with a lot of good talent on them. You will get the best response there I think. I got a lot of good stuff from them.

[midi_mick]

VB has good and simple access to COM interfaces, which are exposed by all of the MS office products. Get onto MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com), and look up the Document Object modelds for the various MS office documents. You can use the "CreateObject" call from VB to create/open one of these documents, than then read and/or manipulate it in various ways using the properties and methods exposed by these objects.

 

I definitely think MSND is the 1st place to start looking for this type of info.

 

Mick