Re: DDE

Neu, Gerhard ([email protected]) wrote :
> Why is there no better detailed explanation for DDE ? 

Probably because DDE was obsoleted by COM in Windows 3.1 (1993).  It's
a wonder any of this has been carried over into the current MS Office
products.

I was looking for some Excel info.  I searched used book stores for
really old computer books.  Sometimes you can even find old versions
of the MS Office products themselves that might have DDE documentation
with them.

I found a few bits of documentation on DDE for various products, but
not the things I was looking for regarding Excel.

For us, we dabbled with it because the user wanted to know what could
be done, but they never came back and requested the work to be done.

In my dabbling, I found DDE to be very sensitive and unstable.
Sometimes things would just stop working after issuing the wrong
statement (which happens when you're playing around to try to figure
things out).

It seems that even what DDE did offer wasn't much.  At the time, I
did not have any VBA experience, but since then, I would think that
potentially a template with VBA behind it could help expand your
interface.  I'm thinking potentially you could write your own command
interface to a spreadsheet.  Poke values into certain cells that your
worksheet programming can watch and act upon.  You can trap updates
in Excel and should be able to have your code do something after
receiving data in a cell from 4Js.  I forget, maybe you can even call
macros from DDE.

I never did find a way (not to say there isn't one) to format cells or
change cell width.  A template could have cells already formatted.  Or,
VBA code could be triggered to do formatting.

This, of course, means you have to have your template on the PC (either
pre-existing or copied on demand) and their Excel has to enable macros.


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Joel Schumacher                    JCPenney Co. - UNIX Network Systems
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