How to use VBA to detect and click "buttons" in third party applications?

[Lexus1]

Dear all,

I am an advanced VBA user as far as using it on the default Microsoft office applications is concerned. But currently I am writing a macro where it would be very beneficial to know how to control third party applications from VBA. Up till now I was quite successful using the Sendkeys function to resolve most of my issues but I am sure a lot of you would agree that this solution is suboptimal.

As such my question in this case is very general: which functions should I learn / look into if I want to operate third party applications from VBA? I am looking for sources and general advice in this case. Optimally what I would like to do is to have VBA detect a button within a third party application (e.g. help button in notepad for example) and click it.

Thanks for any help!

 

[Kyle123]

Firstly, it’s much easier the third party application is com accessible, if it is, you can set a reference to it and away you go.

If not, you probably want to have a look at the get window and send message windows apis. These allow you to get the pointers to various controls and send messages to them, though the application interface you’re working with may make this very hard.

Finally you’ll want to track down a copy of spy++ this will show you how interfaces are constructed and how you can interact with them.

 

[Lexus1]

First thank you for the pointers as to what I should look into.

"it’s much easier the third party application is com accessible, if it is, you can set a reference to it and away you go."- how would I know whether that is the case (I never had the case where that would matter)? Is there a way to test that?

Also another question, as I don't think my initial question covers it, what would I need to use in order to retrieve a value from a third party application form (what I mean here is for example the question whether a box is ticked or not in the form, as I would have to know that in advance (have the macro detect it) as to whether that is the case in order for it to make sense that the sendkeys / sendmessage commands are to be executed)