Using Outlook Object Library in Excel VBA - supporting older versions

[cova]

Hi everyone,
I have been having trouble with libraries in Excel VBA. I need access to some basic Outlook VBA, so have added the Outlook 14.0 Object Library. Only problem then is if that is used on a machine running Office 2007, it does not then reference 12.0 as it does with other libraries. Is there a way to get it to automatically downgrade the version? As otherwise it throws up errors. I think a few people even still use 2003 office, so could do with it working for that too. Is there a way to do this? I tried searching in my 2010 excel libraries but could not find ant 12.0 libraries in there so cant do it that way.
Cheers
Ben

 

[RoryA]

You need to late bind the code so that you don't need to set a reference at all - that way you avoid the problem (assuming of course you don't try and use any code that simply won't work on older versions!).

 

[cytop]

Use late binding rather than early binding.

Instead of

Dim oL as Outlook.Application

use

Dim oL as Object
Set oL = CreateObject("OutLook.Application")

You will lose intellisense and it will be ever so slightly slower in operation but that is the only (or the easiest) way to run different versions of Outlook. See Early binding vs Late binding in Office VBA | msofficefun for more info.

 

[cova]

I also use Outlook.ContactItem in my code. Would I just need to set it so that it was

Dim olitem as Object
Set olitem = CreateObject("Outlook.ContactItem")

as right now it is just

Dim olitem as Outlook.ContactItem

(not really had to deal with early/late binding too much as generally stuck to the main libraries!)

 

[RoryA]

No, you only use CreateObject where you would use

Set ... = New ...

in your early bound code. For a contactitem you would still use the CreateItem method of the Outlook application but because you do not have the reference set, you need to declare the olContactItem constant:

Const olContactItem as Long = 2

then you can use:

set olItem = appOL.CreateItem(olcontactitem)

 

[cova]

OK. One more thing that seems to have broken is I have the following code:

Set runoutlook = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")Set findnamespace = runoutlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set activefolder = findnamespace.Folders
n = 1
Do Until activefolder.Item(n) = mailfoldername
n = n + 1
Loop

as it runs on a secondary mailbox on each users machine (mailfoldername is defined earlier and checks the office version as Office 2010 and above displays it as user@domain.com but below it is "Mailbox - Username")

Would I need to create an item for "Item" in this instance?

EDIT: Never mind, it was my referencing of mailfoldername that was causing the issue