How to Launch a Metro App from Microsoft Access VBA on Windows 10 Computer

Question

I have a situation in which I wanted to utilize the camera app in Windows 10 from my Microsoft Access program. Normally I could just send a command to execute the program's executable, but with the metro app there is no straightforward executable.

The basic code I use is this:

Shell """" & PthToExe & """", vbNormalFocus

PthToExe is the path name for the executable.

Answer 1

I looked around a decent bit, but was unable to find any simple solutions and ended up coming up with my own. My solution is to make a shortcut link to the camera application and then to launch the link.

In order to make a shortcut link in Windows 10, you can click on the start button, go to "All Apps", find the app you want (in my case "Camera"), and then click and drag it to the desktop.

Now that you have a shortcut, you can launch the shortcut from a command line. (So my shortcut doesn't clutter up my desktop, I dragged it off my desktop and into a folder on the "C" drive.)

Type the path into a command prompt like this and hit enter to test launching your app: C:\\GJ\\Camera.lnk

So that solves the problem if you wanted to launch from a command line. For some reason, though, Access would not accept that command. The way I got around it was I put the command in a batch file (Edit: Alternatively, see HansUp's comment). To do that, you just need to open notepad, type in the same thing you typed in the command prompt, save the note pad document, and then rename the document to have a .bat extension.

You can then execute the .bat file from Microsoft Access as follows:

Shell "C:\\GJ\\OpenCamera.bat", vbMinimizedNoFocus

Note that normally, I use vbNormalFocus when running the shell command, but in this case, it is desirable not to see the little command prompt open before the actual program opens.