Running an Excel Add-in function using VBA on remote desktop

Question

I have a scenario where we need to open a number of spreadsheets on a server, update a number of worksheets on each workbook by means of an add in button.

So the user opens remote desktop, opens a spreadsheet, goes to sheet x, goes to the add-ins menu and clicks a button. This button updates the data on the sheet which takes several seconds. Then they open sheet y and repeat. Eventually all sheets are updated and the user saves and closes the sheet.

I am trying to automate this. My thinking is to have a "master excel document" with a button to execute VBA code which will:

• Open a specific folder
• Open each workbook in the folder
• Cycle through the sheets and find the ones that need to be updated (as not every sheet needs to be updated)
• Once completed, save and close the sheet and then repeat for all workbooks and for all folders.

My major problem right now is that I need to figure out how to execute the Add-in function from my VBA code. I have researched and found that I need to run it using code like this: APPLICATION.RUN "ADDIN_NAME.XLA!SUBNAME"

I think I have the ADDIN_NAME (found this by clicking file, options, add-ins). But I cannot figure out how to get the subname.

Using the Macro recorder doesn't work - no code is recorded for clicking the add-in button. When I hover my mouse over the add-in button, it give me "Analyst : Refresh Report, Use Current Criteria". Any suggestions as to how I could work out what the subname is?

Answer 1

You could pry open the xls(m?) file by renaming it to zip, open it in ZIP, navigate to the customUI/customUI.xml and open that in Notepad. Reading that should give you the name of the macro each button added is calling.

eg.

 ....size="large" onAction="showuserform" imageMso="CreateRepo....

where showuserform is the name of the macro being called.