Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Saving time with VBA and Outlook

Over the years, I've used Visual Basic for Applications in a lot of ways.  I've never really thought of myself as an expert, but I have written a fair bit of VB scripts, even though I'm mostly a Unix/C++/Java programmer.

One thing I've always appreciated about the VB community is that there is a lot of code sharing.  One script I stumbled on a while back is for downloading all attachments, from all selected files, in Outlook.

Our department scanner will send me a separate email for each file that I scan, which means that I can scan all of my students' assignments, one at a time, and have a digital copy of each.  But forwarding those on to the students is usually a pain.

Enter VBA... I used this script to download all the attachments at once.  Then I used the preview pane in Windows to quickly check that the file names were time-ordered in the same sequence as the students user IDs.  A few lines of bash later, and all 89 pdfs were mailed.  Hooray!

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