April 2006
Beginner
1114 pages
98h 16m
English
Content preview from Programming Excel with VBA and .NETBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Find the Right Function
Windows is enormous, and finding the function for a specific task within its forest of DLLs can be daunting. The best guide through the Win32 API is Programming Windows by Charles Petzold (Microsoft Press). The second-best (and free) guide is the online Microsoft Developer’s Network found at http://msdn.microsoft.com.
You should look to DLLs only when you have a specific task in mind and you’ve already exhausted possible solutions through the built-in members provided by Visual Basic and Excel. Often, programmers resort to DLL functions when the built-in features of Excel aren’t specific enough. For example, the Wait method in Excel has a one-second resolution. If you want to pause for a fraction of a second, you need to resort to the Sleep DLL function.
One of the best tools for finding Win32 API functions is the API Viewer utility (APILOAD.EXE) that shipped with the Visual Basic Standard and Professional Editions , Versions 4.0 through 6.0. To use the API Viewer:
Run APILOAD.EXE.
Choose File → Load Text File and select WIN32API.TXT.
Choose Declares from the drop-down list and browse through the list of functions or type a few letters to find functions by name as shown in Figure 23-1.
Tip
What if you don’t have Visual Basic Professional or Standard Edition? The WIN32API.TXT file is freely distributable and you can find it with this book’s samples. You can browse that file using Notepad or any other text editor.
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