Hi all,



I have a number of documents on a server that I regularly change. Instead of emailing and telling people to look at the updates - is there any way to have an automatic email send out to a number of email addresses saying that a change has been made?

I know Google docs has this function but I need to keep this in office.

Thankful for any input

How automatic do you want it to be? You could write a VBA program that sends an email, and save it within each document so as to run automatically whenever you save it. But that doesn't sound very satisfactory to me; you'd have to trust that you'll never want to save it without notifying everyone, and then too you have to have a copy in every Office document in the folder (or at least every document for which you want notification).

Or you could write the same program in VBScript; it wouldn't run automatically, but you could send a standard email just by double clicking on the icon after saving one of the documents. But it wouldn't name which document(s) had changed unless you wanted to type in the document names each time; that doesn't sound like a great solution either.

Are they all Excel documents? I think it's possible to write a VBA program that resides not in any one workbook but in a sort of central workbook that is open whenever you're using Excel; maybe you could get it to notice when you save one of the documents in that folder and send the email. Then it'd happen automatically and exist in just one place. But it still would send it every time you save one of those documents, which may not suit you. (It certainly wouldn't suit me.)

Thanks for your answer. I have been thinking about writing a VBA program / script as you say. To be honest I don't think, in this case, that it will be an issue that it sends an email every time I save it. The documents are all in excel yes, and it is kind of a template or information file, so the purpose is to notify people. And instead of them having to check it I thought that I would try to solve it for them.

I will try to write a script with the middle level knowledge I have, if you have any advice it is appreciated.

Cheers

I've written VBA programs that send email, but they've never been easy; I dread it every time. I'm sure if I actually buckled down and did a lot of it, I would find (just as with Excel) that it's merely a matter of learning how the objects work in Outlook. I haven't done that yet, so it's still difficult.

However, the difficulty has nothing to do with the fact that you're writing for Outlook inside an Excel document. It's just my unfamiliarity with the Outlook object model. If you run into problems and can't figure them out, I suggest you post a question over on the Outlook forum. Also, of course, read the VBA/Outlook documentation on-line; I can point you to that, if you don't already know where it is.

As a last resort, maybe I'll be able to add something. As I said, I've done it before. 'Twasn't easy, though.

And, of course, if your difficulty is merely with VBA programming, any of us here should be able to contribute something.