Blog posts

Working with the clipboard using the Windows API ... put text into the clipboard, get text from the clipboard, empty the clipboard, check whether the clipboard contents have changed.

A feature that I felt was missing from VBE_Extras was the ability to open the Microsoft documentation web pages. This feature now exists.

The VBE has a habit of changing the letter case of words (that are code ... not literal values and/or comments) when you are typing in code. For example, I often find that the letter casing of the word "Value" gets changed to "value". VBE_Extras now includes a "Fix case" command that will correct the case for all matches of that word.

The AutoText functionality of VBE_Extras already provided numerous ways to speed up entering code ... now it has one more trick up its sleeve: numeric and String expansions for ++, --, +=, -=, *=, /=, \=, ^=, &=

When working with Windows API Functions, you will often have an error number made available to the calling code. There are, literally, thousands of error numbers, and they are listed on the Microsoft error codes page.

Setting file / folder attributes using the SetFileAttributes Windows API Function

Getting file / folder attributes using the GetFileAttributes Windows API Function

Often, especially when creating text to show to a user in a dialog, I have a Collection or Array of Strings that I want to use to inform the user of some information. Code to compile those Strings into "clean" user-friendly text can be a pain to write ... for example, making sure the penultimate and last items are delimited by "and" instead of a comma especially when you don't know how many Strings will be included from the off.

The standard VBA.InputBox (and Application.InputBox, available if working in Excel) only allow you to enter a single line of text. What to do if you want to allow a user to enter multiple lines of text? Use a UserForm with a multiline TextBox ...

The EnumChildWindows Windows API Function enumerates all child windows of a (parent) window ... and it does so recursively in that all child windows of those child windows (ie so grandchild windows) are also enumerated, as are great-grandchild windows, great-great-grandchild windows and so on. This makes EnumChildWindows very handy if you want to get a list of all such windows, or if you want to get all such window(s) with a specific caption and/or class name.