VBA background code to see how long the spreadsheet has been open

Question

I want to write some VBA in a spreadsheet so that it will evaluate how long the spreadsheet has been open and once it hits a certain time point (say an hour), then it will warn the user that it will automatically close in 15 mins.

Has anyone done anything like this or seen it open? I have a tab called Reference where I can put an auto-open piece of code to log when they opened it but I want the spreadsheet to check unprompted at certain intervals how long the sheet has been opened for.

The purpose of this is I want to force a close where a user has accidentally left a spreadsheet open so it's important it isn't assessed based on user input. Note - I don't care if they lose work, I just want to close the spreadsheet.

Any help is really appreciated.

Answer 1

To schedule the call of a routine, use Application.OnTime . To ensure that the routine is scheduled to "one hour after opening", create a Workbook-Open sub (in ThisWorkbook-Module) and put something like this into it:

Private Sub Workbook_Open()
    Application.OnTime DateAdd("h", 1, Now), InformUser
End Sub

This will call the Sub InformUser one hour after the Workbook was opened. In this routine you could add another call to OnTime . However, you need to be a little bit careful how to inform the user. If you simple use MsgBox but the user is not reacting to that, the MsgBox-Window stays active and as it is a modal window, the code will not continue to run and the OnTime -procedure will never be triggered. It's not easy to create a MsgBox with a TimeOut (see Display a message box with a timeout value ), so maybe create a simple form and show it Non-Modal.

Sub InformUser()
    InfoForm.Show modal:=False
    Application.OnTime DateAdd("n", 15, Now), ShutDown   ' "n": Minutes ("m" stands for months)
End Sub

Sub ShutDown
    ThisWorkbook.Close SaveChanges:=True   ' Or "False" if you don't want to save - use on your own risk...
End Sub