vba to control mouse on screen incl. applications outside Excel

[cjcass]

Hi,
I am trying to use vba to control mouse movements and clicks on screen. As a starting point I want to just minimise Excel then minimise the application visible after Excel is minimised but the code I've got so far won't do this - it minimises Excel ok but then won't do a further minimise of the next visible application on screen. I have two chunks of code as follows:

Option Explicit

#If VBA7 Then
Public Declare PtrSafe Function SetCursorPos Lib "user32" (ByVal x As Long, ByVal y As Long) As Long
Public Declare PtrSafe Sub mouse_event Lib "user32" (ByVal dwFlags As Long, ByVal dx As Long, ByVal dy As Long, ByVal cButtons As Long, ByVal dwExtraInfo As LongPtr)
#Else
Public Declare Function SetCursorPos Lib "user32" (ByVal x As Long, ByVal y As Long) As Long
Public Declare Sub mouse_event Lib "user32" (ByVal dwFlags As Long, ByVal dx As Long, ByVal dy As Long, ByVal cButtons As Long, ByVal dwExtraInfo As Long)
#End If

Const MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTDOWN = &H2
Const MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTUP = &H4
Const MOUSEEVENTF_RIGHTDOWN As Long = &H8
Const MOUSEEVENTF_RIGHTUP As Long = &H10
Dim TimerActive As Boolean

And then I run this macro:

SetCursorPos 1804, 11 'x and y position
mouse_event MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTDOWN, 0, 0, 0, 0
mouse_event MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTUP, 0, 0, 0, 0
 
Application.Wait Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 2)

SetCursorPos 1828, 6 'x and y position
mouse_event MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTDOWN, 0, 0, 0, 0
mouse_event MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTUP, 0, 0, 0, 0

Any help much appreciated.

 

[sijpie]

As far as I am aware you can't use mouse events in another application.

But you can can send key presses to other applications. If you send the following two keystrokes to an app:
Alt-Space
n
then it will minimise the app.

To read more about this, search on "VBA sendkeys"

 

[Jaafar Tribak]

Programmatically interacting with applications using mouse clicks or keystrokes blindly won't get you far.

Depending on what you want to achieve with the mouse clicks out of the target application(s) , there are better approaches such as using MSAA, UI Automation, OLE automation if supported or simply Sending WIN32 messages to the target application.

If I just wanted to minimize an application, I would first obtain the handle to the main window (hwnd) and then send to it the WM_SYSCOMMAND message along with SC_MINIMIZE in the wParam parameter using the SendMessage API.