AppActivate stopped working

[Giordano Bruno]

I have the following code in a macro which used to work:

AppActivate "Microsoft Word"
SendKeys ("^v"), Wait:=True
SendKeys "{RIGHT 3}", Wait:=True
AppActivate "Microsoft Excel"

It has now decided to stop at the first of these lines with a Run-time error 5. Invalid procedure call or argument.

If I comment out the line, manually change focus to the already open Word window and continue the macro, it happily deals with the last line and returns focus back to Excel.

A couple of days ago this code was working for me and I can't think what may have made the difference or why it is failing me now

 

[bjurney]

There are a few things that may be effecting this, first, check to make sure that Microsoft Word is still the wording on the bar at the top of the application. Second, make sure that the application is not minimized, the appactivate, at least for me does not seem to activate the program in the code, however it normally does not give a run time error either so this probably is not your problem. Last thing to check would be that with the appactivate the program must be open. If your Microsoft word program is not open it will give you the Run time error 5 message. If you are looking to activate a new Microsoft word program with your code, try the following:

Sub mycode()
Dim wurd
wurd= Shell("winword.exe", 1)
SendKeys ("^v"), Wait:=True
SendKeys "{RIGHT 3}", Wait:=True
AppActivate "Microsoft Excel"
End Sub

Best of luck!

 

[Norie]

Honestly, I would recommend not using either SendKeys or AppActivate - as you seem to have found out they can just cause problems.

What are you actually trying to do?

 

[Giordano Bruno]

Thanks for that bjurney. I get a pass on all of your possible suggestions. Thanks also for the code snippet which I shall copy to my macro file.

I've had some success replacing the first of the lines quoted with

Word.Application.Activate

I've left the AppAcitivate "Microsofr Excel" as that has not yet given me any trouble.

All the best,

GB

 

[Giordano Bruno]

Thanks Norrie,

I hate send keys and have now learned not to trust AppActivate either.

What I do is run a long macro which generates a formated screen of data. I then use this macro to make a camera copy of the data, switch to Word and paste it into the document, then return to Excel.

I have extended the code to call another macro which automatically generates the next screen of data and I have been trying to make a loop to run through all of the data, up to 100 images in total.

What I am finding is that it mostly works, but sometimes in place of images in the Word document, I see the occasional "v" where SendKeys has failed.

If you can suggest a better way, I'll go for it.