I have come across a strange error and am looking for some insights.
Scenario:
A powerpoint file on a shared drive is opened by user A. User B now wants to open the same file, and is presented with a "open as read only?" dialog. User clicks "OK".
The file is opened, and an add-in runs (whenever a file is opened) to check for certain tags on slides, indicating presence of confidential material. This causes an error in the following function:
Function taggedSlide(tagName As String)
' find the slide which is tagged with tagName
Dim oSl As Slide
Set oSl = Nothing
For Each oSl In ActivePresentation.Slides
If Len(oSl.Tags(tagName)) > 0 Then <<<<<<<<<<<<<<< this is the line that causes error
Set taggedSlide = oSl
Exit Function
End If
Next oSl
Set taggedSlide = Nothing
End Function
The function ostensibly loops over all slides in the presentation, looks for a tag called tagName, and returns the slide (or Nothing). It looks like this only involves "read" operations, but the code throws an error at the indicated line.
To make things more interesting, the behavior is different if I simply mark a file as "read only", save it, and open it. The difference seems to be that I can modify the file in that case - I just can't save it. But this file cannot be edited at all, even if I don't save it. And the above "read" operation is treated as a "modification"...
I have the following questions:
Is there a document property that I can read in VBA to tell me this is a "cannot modify" file? I am looking for something akin to ActivePresentation.ReadOnly, but that is set for a "read only" file, and this is different.
Why does the line If Len(oSl.Tags(tagName)) > 0 Then get treated as a "modifying file" operation?
It was difficult to reproduce this error, because I really needed to have two users open the same file (saving the file as read-only was not enough) to make it happen. Looking forward to your insights / comments / answers!
Related
I have a macro which should open, edit and copy the contents of read-only documents into a new document, then closes the original ones without saving. On my computer I get a runtime error 6124: "You are not allowed to edit this selection because it is protected."
When I open the document through VBA it says I am restricted with view only, however when I open it manually I get the notification that the author would like me to open it read only, and I can refuse.
The weird thing is I sent the macro to my colleague to test it, and the same code on the same files can do the editing for them.
Is there a setting I am not aware of that allows this to happen?
Is there a way to get VBA to open the read-only document with editing access?
I have tried to change the document attribute through runtime script, but it did not work:
Dim fso, doc As Object
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set doc = fso.GetFile("path")
doc.Attributes = 0
Documents.Open("path")
End Sub
At the moment, I have a Visio file that hasa network zoning diagram (Page 1) where a user can put shaped in different zones. One can run a VB macro over that page, which will collect all kinds of data that is specific to those shapes and flows and exports it to a Word file for further reporting. That's all good and work as expected.
However, the networking zoning is different on for instance cloud. So, I want to make another page (Page 2) in the same file, that has more cloud (GCP, AWS) oriented zoning details (VPC etc.). And I want to run the same macros over that Page (2) to export the details to a word file.
PROBLEM: How and where should I tell the macro which Page it should get the data from in order to run the output. I have been playing with things like "Set vsoPage = ActiveWindow.Page" and have that executed before the macro collects all the meta information of the shapes
My hope was, based on the MS Visio page, that the macro would grab the shapes from the page that would have been active.
But no, it just spits out stuff on Page 1. And not Page 2 (although active).
Just wondering if:
- this is the right line of code to use?
- is the location correct?
Many thanks for your help
More likely to be:
Set vsoPage = ActivePage
I'm not exactly sure how and when your macro works, but here's some snippets that might help:
'// Get the active page:
Dim visPg as Visio.Page
Set visPg = Visio.ActivePage
If Not(visPg Is Nothing) Then
...
End If
'// Here we'll be really picky about the active window, this is
'// probably overkill, but Visio can have several different types
'// of active windows:
Dim visPg as Visio.Page
Dim visWin As Visio.Window
Set visWin = Visio.ActiveWindow
If (visWin .Type = Visio.VisWinTypes.visDrawing) Then
If (visWin .SubType = Visio.VisWinTypes.visPageWin) Then
'// The active window is a drawing page window, and not
'// a master-editing window, nor a group-editing window:
Set visPg = visWin.Page
'//...do stuff with visPg
End If
End If
Consider VBA for PowerPoint -
Is this a valid Presentations function call?
Presentations(".\directory\ppname.ppt")
Note that this will be called from within a PowerPoint presentation VBA, to open another one in a sub-directory.
The Microsoft Presentations examples (and most others) are not specific about the filename forms accepted, e.g. those using the ".", "..", "\" directives recognized in DOS scripts.
This seems to work with Powerpoint 2007.
As described in the comment, it takes a block of text (the TextRange), the starting position and length of file reference, also a LinkAddr. LinkAddr is essentially a DOS-style file reference, like "..\folder\ppfile.ppt".
The intention here is to launch another PowerPoint tool by invoking its show.ppt or show.ppsm file name. The file name can refer to some other directory using MSDOS file name stuff. I don't know whether it can span different machine platforms, but it seems to work within one Windows 10 system.
My difficulty in getting this to work was some full-path links to images, e.g. something like C:\blah\blah\image.jpg, in the Visual Basic code. PowerPoint didn't like these, instead asked about enabling macros, and just hung up when one of my file links were to be executed. By getting rid of the "macro" complaints, this suddenly started working.
Or maybe some bugs have been fixed in recent repairs to my 2007 PowerPoint tools??
Go figure...
Sub InsertLink(ByRef Trange As TextRange, fpos As Long, msglen As Long, LinkAddr As String)
' Insert an HTML link into the selected TextFrame.
' get the character range
Dim Hrange As TextRange
Set Hrange = Trange.Characters(Start:=fpos, length:=msglen)
' make it an HTML link
With Hrange.ActionSettings(ppMouseClick)
.Action = ppActionHyperlink
.Hyperlink.Address = LinkAddr
End With
End Sub
So I have tons of data in my workbook that I need to pass on to my users in a way that allows them to interact with the workbook..., but also limits what they can actually do. So I have made it so they can access certain pages to Add needed data, then I've given access to a menu page so they can run a report.
This report I have found is best if it's an html page.
To that end, I have tried several different ways, save as...and publish. I like the publish version, but I can not for the life of me get this working. All the samples I see, appear to be the same. Here is the line of code in question:
ActiveWorkbook.PublishObjects.Add(xlSourceSheet, ActiveWorkbook.Path & ".htm, "Sheet1", "", xlHtmlStatic, "", "Report Title").Publish True
Every time I get a run time error '1004':
Method 'Publish' of object 'PublishObject' failed
I have the above line of code in a sub, am I missing something? Do I need to set up the publish differently? Thanks for any ideas.
I have had a similar mysterious problem that sometimes it (.Publish) works and sometimes it doesn't, when I try publish.
However, I think the problem might be, in cases when it doesn't work right off the bat, to first save the relevant region as a webpage so that it exists already on the server. After that region has been saved at least once (manually or else maybe with .SaveAs .. see below), then the publish might work.
Here is an example of how I get this to work more consistently, something to convey the structure that works for me:
wkb=ActiveWorkbook.Name 'save wb for later access
url="http://a.com/b.htm" 'save to Internet
sheetname="c"
Sheets(sheetname).Range("d1:e2").Select 'activating sheet may be necessary
On Error Resume Next 'anticipate error to handle it
'Now comes the publish line the first time... which may work.. or not
ActiveWorkbook.PublishObjects.Add(xlSourceRange,url,sheetname,"d1:e2",xlHtmlStatic,"blah","moreblah").Publish (True) 'may fail to create page on website if page didn't already exist
theerr=Err.Number
On Error GoTo 0 'back to default error handling (none)
If theerr <> 0 Then 'if here perhaps because page nonexistent
'msgbox "maybe add warning here [FYI]"
Sheets("dummysheetwithlittleornodata").Copy 'will create workbook
On Error Resume Next
ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs url 'may fail to create webpage first time
ActiveWorkbook.saveAs url 'twice needed for some reason sometimes. [works for me]
On Error GoTo 0
'with fresh dummy html page created, now publish should hopefully work.. let's try again
ActiveWorkbook.Close savechanges:=False 'clean up and avoid popup
Workbooks(wkb).Activate 'get back to correct wkb
Sheets(sheetname).Range("d1:e2").Select
ActiveWorkbook.PublishObjects.Add(xlSourceRange,url,sheetname,"d1:e2",xlHtmlStatic,"blah","moreblah").Publish (True) 'hopefully if failed first time, now it succeeded ! good luck.
End If
The above code structure has allowed me to solve several publish problems I was having. All the techniques together have been enough so far to allow me to save a range from a sheet as a webpage (to server I have write access to) without having to do anything manually (like a manual save or even click on popup). Good Luck.
[The different non-obvious techniques include activating a range before trying a range publish, using the error handling approach and anticipating failure at certain points, the 2x saveas to compensate for mysterious inconsistent failures when using one saveas only, closing and getting back to original workbook cleanly, and using saveas to "guarantee" page exists in form that will make publish to succeed more consistently.]
I have a VBA script used to process Word documents. The first thing the program does is to create an index of the documents in a defined set of folders. It then goes through the list processing each of the indexed documents.
The problem I am having is that it will sometimes decide that a particular document cannot be found, even though it previously indexed the document and a quick spot check shows the document to be in the correct place.
Can anyone shed some light on why VBA should display this behaviour?
The script is using the Dir$ function to index the files, and the Documents.Open function to open each word document for processing.
Sample code:
ChangeFileOpenDirectory (folderName)
inputFileName = Dir$(folderName & "*.doc")
Do While inputFileName <> ""
... call various functions here ...
inputFileName = Dir$
Loop
One of the functions called in the block has the following line:
Set currentDoc = Documents.Open(fileName:=docFileName, AddToRecentFiles:=False, Visible:=False)
This is the point at which the code is failing.
One of the most annoying things I have found is that recent files links are returned as the files themselves with Dir. You can use the FileSystemObject to check the file type.
I copy/paste your code and it works correctly.
However, it leaves all the files open (and hidden), and when you run it in another directory, additional files are opened and added to the open projects (take a look in the VBA editor).
My only guess is that after a while you're hitting the maximum allowable number of open files.
Try adding
currentdoc.Close
just before
inputFileName = Dir$
A few reasons, some duplicated from other answers:
If the path+ filename is long enough ... (you already answered in a comment)
If you are writing new files to same directory, Dir$ may get corrupted (happened to me)
If you have filenames with non-std chars (ex. "#")
Files locked by other processes
Files deleted while the macro is running
You may also try this code ...
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
If Not fso.FileExists(file) Then ....
First enable the Microsoft Scripting reference in the VBE