Comments on: The Dir Function

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:35:00 +0000

What happens if you know the file name but not the directory?

By: Eduardo Pereira Garcia

Eduardo Pereira Garcia — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:41:00 +0000

Great !!!
Faster and Efficient.

By: larry

larry — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:17:00 +0000

Do you know of a short way to validate the format of a filename is a proper name before it is used on any VBA functions?

By: steve

steve — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 10:44:00 +0000

A bit of an amateur on the old Excel and VBA but loving the things it can do! searching the net i wanted to find a way of linking workbooks together.
i have three work books that contain various information and work indepently but on all the 3 workbooks there are 4 columns that share the same information. what i want is some knid of command that send this information to my newly proposed 4th workbook capturing only the information of these 4 columns.
i was thinking of either a VBA command button on the 4th 'new' file that when pressed draws the information from the others or maybe an automatic funtion that when lets say the word 'complete' is added to each of the individual 3 work books then this information is automatically inputted on the next available empty row on my newly created 4th.

i really need help with the above and since my search on the net brought me to this sight then i guess it's a great place to start. looking through some of the topics i think i'll be staying here for a while but as for now i really need some help with the above.

hope you can help

steve

By: Pat O'Brien

Pat O'Brien — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 16:29:00 +0000

Just a quick caution....

If you're using the DIR command to loop through files, and are calling other routines to process the files, the other routines cannot have their own DIR command used in them.

This resets the location that the DIR command looks at and subsequent calls to DIR in the main routine will fail.

By: Harald Staff

Harald Staff — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 12:54:00 +0000

Note also the optional parameter. Like

Function FolderExists(sFolderPath As String) As Boolean
FolderExists = (Dir(sFolderPath, vbDirectory) <> "")
End Function

By: Salvador Ramos

Salvador Ramos — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 22:07:00 +0000

Very good!!!

By: Matt H

Matt H — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 15:06:00 +0000

Useful function, Dick! The first piece of code is easier to look at quickly and go, yeah, I understand what this does. J.E.M's would probably run faster if you called the function hundreds or thousands of times.

If you wanted to whittle it down even more, and avoid the len() and not() functions altogether:

Function FileExists(sFilePath As String) As Boolean
FileExists = (Dir(sFilePath) <> "")
End Function

The thing about this is that you have to look at it and think for a few minutes, what's really going on here?

By: J.E. McGimpsey

J.E. McGimpsey — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 12:00:00 +0000

Hi Dick!

Don't know how many of your readers are MacXL users. The Windows wildcard characters (*, ?) are legal filename characters for Macs, so they can't be used with Dir(). Here's the equivalent cross-platform LoopThroughXLS, using conditional compilation:

Public Sub LoopThroughXLS()
Dim sFName As String
#If Mac Then
sFName = Dir(CurDir, MacID("XLS8?))
#Else
sFName = Dir("*.xls")
#End If
Do While Len(sFName) > 0
Debug.Print sFName
sFName = Dir
Loop
End Sub

By: J.E. McGimpsey

J.E. McGimpsey — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:42:00 +0000

Hi Dick!

Just a personal preference: whenever a result is a boolean, I prefer avoiding the If...Then...End If structure:

Public Function FileExists(sFilePath As String) As Boolean
FileExists = Not (Len(Dir(sFilePath)) = 0 )
End Function.