On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 22:12:51 +0900, Peter Bailey wrote:

> Victor 'Zverok' Shepelev wrote:
>> Peter Bailey (pbailey / bna.com)
>> 26/10/2006 15:44:12
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> Can someone tell me how I can use Win32OLE to open an existing file? All 
>>> the doc I've seen just shows you how to start a new file, like this:
>>> 
>>> require 'Win32ole'
>>> excel = WIN32OLE.new("excel.application")
>> 
>> excel = WIN32OLE.new('excel.application')
>> book = excel.Workbooks.Open(path)
>> 
>> Typical answer for all similar questions: open Excel, start macro 
>> recording, do what you want, stop macro recording. Open recorded macro - 
>> it would be in VBA, but can be ported into Ruby w. WIN32OLE pretty 
>> straightforward.
>> 
>> V.
> 
> Thanks, Victor. I tried it with an existing file, and, it worked! It's 
> pretty slow, but, the books warned me about that. So, are you saying 
> that all of the WIN32OLE instructions are simply VBA instructions? So, 
> technically, I could derive my answers by just looking at the VBA help 
> in Word or Excel??
>

Precisely. VBA is just another language for controllng OLE objects, so the
same API's are available for VBA and Ruby (and any other language you
might choose that talks OLE). 

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/