Comments on: Automation in UDFs

By: Tushar Mehta

Tushar Mehta — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 05:43:00 +0000

Hi Dick,

I've been toying with the same idea for some time now, but in the context of treating an XL workbook/sheet as a function.

It seems to work...kind of...in the limited testing I've done...but...

...but it violates so many documented and unwritten norms of XL/VBA programming that I've been reluctant to publicize the technique.

That said, the concept can be an awesome tool in one's repertoire. An XL workbook serving as a function!

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 22:07:00 +0000

I suppose so many exceptions are to be expected when you take something that Microsoft wrote for interactive GUI use and try to use it programmatically...

I think the only time you'll see Excel fail to clean-up the outlook process is if Excel dies unexpectedly. When it crashes, it doesn't necessarily have an opportunity to decrement the reference counts on the outlook COM object.

You could probably test the theory with the following command: "taskkill.exe /F /IM excel.exe".

By: Dick

Dick — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 21:00:00 +0000

The point is the former, but I might disagree with you on efficiency. The final product would be more efficient, but to write code that parses it as effectively as Outlook does would take me about 100 years. Well, maybe only 50.

It may be that I give Outlook too much credit in this regard. It seems that for every exception that I code for, there's always another one; or an exception to the exception.

By: J-Walk

J-Walk — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 20:19:00 +0000

Is the point here to demonstrate how to use automation inside of a function, or to actually parse a name? If it’s the latter, I think it would be much more efficient to write your own parsing code in VBA. Using automation just seems like overkill to m.