Chapter 27: Manipulating Files with VBA

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Overview

In This Chapter

In this chapter, I describe how to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to perform common (and not so common) file operations and work directly with text files.

• A basic overview of VBA text file manipulation features

• Performing common file operations

• Various ways to open a text file

• Displaying extended file information, such as details for media files

• Examples of reading and writing a text file with VBA

• Sample code for exporting a range to HTML and XML format

• Zipping and unzipping files

Many applications that you develop for Excel require working with external files. For example, you might need to get a listing of files in a directory, delete files, rename files, and so on. Excel, of course, can import and export several types of text files. In many cases, however, Excel's built-in text file handling isn't sufficient. For example, you might want to export a range of cells to a simple HyperText Markup Language (HTML) file.