What I am really needing is one that can be driven from a programming language – not a GUI. But here is a list of my research thus far.

• Stack Overflow – with lots of links and a discussion of how
  • Image J – MIGHT have an API
  • Digitize IT – I need to email to see what command line options exist
  • g3data – all source code is available under github. Written in c. This might be close to what I need!
  • BINGO Enguage Digitizer has a command line option
    • install is messy – needs support link here
      • See Jeff Bailer’s installer

Using a chm file – here is how (scroll waaaaay down) to link your help file and your function. I want to do this pro grammatically and generate a link automatically. We will see how that goes.

Did you know you can get all of your VBA code extracted to a text file procedure by procedure (using VBA itself?) I made an export tool for all my modules, but I always wanted to add help like they do in c# (sandcastle style) and link to a help file. Check this link. I have so much code now I am going crazy.

First,

[UPDATE: I think I am in the wrong business – I think I should no become a Filemaker hosting company. One can make some good $$] I have never seen software so easy to install and use as Filemaker Server. Open one port on your fire wall  (5003) and you have a hosting solution and very stable (you never touch it and it backs up and backs up etc. etc faithfully. Truely Apple software – do keep in mind as you read – that I am quite biased to doing it on your own. But I will try my best to be objective.

However, if you have nightmares from other products and don’t want to worry at all, here are some links Continue reading →

So I found 1 great article that looked promising but it didn’t pan out because it was written before a change by Excel. Basically the problem is that GetObject (or c# GetActiveObject) only gets a RANDOM copy of a running instance. If there is more than one instance of Excel, for instance, and you are searching for a workbook (in my case one with a specific named range) you will not find the workbook unless you iterate through all the Application instances of Excel. If you look in Task Manager … why are there two? Simple. If you are in explorer and you click on a .xls* file and the preview pane is on – it starts an instance of Excel (one example).

Here is the article that did not work and here is a complicated one that is just as good as the GetObject (it gets only once instance) … HOWEVER … combining the two … now that is magic. I got it working. This article is a sub-article of the last post in which I iterated over all apps searching for a .visible instance in which to piggy back and run VBA the code in Excel. Why? Because I had LOTS of previous code already written in Excel – I just needed it to run. It starts and drives AutoCAD. Continue reading →

So, for now this article is a list of links that I used to pull this off. It is VERY rough  but, I have LOTS of VBA code in Excel that I want to reuse but have Excel VBA triggered FROM THE WEB when a piping designer clicks on it. [Update: it fully works and is in use!] The link drives the existing VBA in excel which in turn, drives the running instance of Autocad and does lots of things – in this case I want to reuse my code that opens an autocad drawing, iterates through all the components until the one you want is found, then it zooms into an AutoCad component of the currently selected cell.

This link is in a SSRS (Report Services) page that we already have to find components based on the long and short description from AutoPLANT. Here is the round trip discussion and the links I used are at the bottom. I can’t believe I did this. Super cool. Continue reading →

In order of usefulness here are a set of links for myself to fully investigate. I did this before but if you use the wrong key words in Google – you pull up pupkis – now I used a different set of keywords and I pulled up a goldmine.  Here they are in order of usefulness or in order of what I will try first. I want a solution with the least hassle for my customers to install on their own computers.

• Power Query – a Business Intelligence (BI) MS Excel plug in from Microsoft
• Power Query from someone else’s experience 
• A plug in made by someone else that exposes .net functions to be used right in the queries
  • it is called http://thingiequery.com/
•  Using MSQuery – but it requires setup outside Excel
• SQL Queries tool

I am trying to automate Navisworks for the first time and my first use is to use a tabular Excel sheet to locate and step through items for Quality Control purposes. There are many other uses I have in my head, but this is the start.

• In .net – getting started I am hoping to do it from Excel (goto xyz coordinate) via VBA – but lets see how far we get
• Ooohh – here is a nice “Getting started” pdf on learning about Navisworks and automation
• Quick Keys
• Ahhh poppycock this is not straightforward – just use AutoIT or AutoHotKey key stroking tool … but wait … OK!!!!! I figured it out … read here (this link added once i got time and a significant amount of research later! – told you it was not straightforward.).
  • The other issue with the AutoIT hotkey is there is a certain sequence of filling in the boxes and auto-triggers the tool to do what we do. The school of hard knocks. Using .net or VBA COM makes Navisworks behave like we expect it to.
• More links found a month later that explain an awful lot I wish I had when I started… Continue reading →