I have a general question and I’m not sure where to begin, literally. Can you please leave any direction at a fairly high level so I have the chance to try to figure it out for myself? Here’s my initial plan, but here’s the issue! I don’t know where to start. Where would I begin with this? Would it be an Excel module? I need some direction guys!! Let me give you a quick run down of what we’re trying to accomplish.
We start out with 2-3 customer specific spreadsheets with an account number + [static] file name.xlsx and about 7 generic template excel files where we use the data from the customer specific spreadsheets and save a copy of each of the template files in the customers store folder.
What I’m trying to figure out if VBA is the direction that I need to be going with this or if there is another method that would accomplish the same goal or be more efficient at getting it done. My thinking at this point is open one of the customers files, save the active workbook file path as a string (this would contain the file directory, division, customer number and customer name), split the string of the file path and save the information that I need as variables, open the appropriate template files based on division number, probably run a couple recorded macros then re-save the files using the account number in the appropriate directory. If there’s anything else I left out for this to make more sense, please let me know and I’ll re-edit the post. Thank you in advance for any guidance!!
I don’t think you should use Access or VSTO – I’ll explain why, then offer a practical way forward.
Access is way over the top for what you want to do: most people find it much easier to write code in Excel VBA (I speak as a trainer with 20 years of experience, who is a guru on both packages).
Visual Studio Tools for Office was Microsoft’s attempt to get the business world to stop using VBA in Excel, and use the much more robust VSTO within Visual Studio. It’s a great idea, but unfortunately not many people seem to be adopting it. In computing it’s rarely a good idea not to go with the flow (and anyway, the learning curve for VBA is shorter than that for VSTO, IMHO – hope that’s enough acronyms in one sentence!).
As to the practical solution: I’ve just finished writing a fairly large online tutorial in Excel VBA, which is at exactly the level you need, I think.
Good luck!