Thanks. I used a combination of the two methods. I create an instance of
excel from outlook and call a macro within that process. Unfortunatly,
outlook still freezes until the called procedure is over, so I created a
dummy macro so that control was retrurned to outlook.

sub dummy 'called from outlook
application.ontime Now,"RealProcedure"
end sub
sub realprocedure
'...
end sub

Thanks again
Rob


"keepITcool" wrote:


ah..

nope no script:


Probably:
I'd keep my routines inside outlook and monitor
outlook events StartUp and NewMail

Why does it lock up the machine?
is it just a boring routine that needs an instance of excel
(to log stuff in excel files) Does it need user input?

Why not create an excel instance from Outlook?
then maybe you can skip the scheduling and just
perform the routine in THAT instance.


--
keepITcool
| www.XLsupport.com | keepITcool chello nl | amsterdam


Rob wrote :

Thanks for the quick reply. Does the nature of what I'm doing change
your mind or do you still think a vbscript is the right way to go?
If so, I'd presumably need to create the scheduled task
programatically. How would I go about doing that?

context of the problem:
There's a macro which runs when an e-mail is received. It locks up
the machine while it runs, so I'm giving the user the option to defer
running the macro for 5 mins, a bit like a reminder. As this is a
relatively short time, I'm not too worried about the user closing
Outlook. Also the nature of the task performed is such that I could
have it run when outlook re-opens.



"keepITcool" wrote:
hmm..
and then the user closes outlook..
so the ontime wont work.

safer to create a vbscript and
run that as a scheduled task

Rob wrote :
I want to set a macro to run at a given time.

Application.OnTime 'does this in excel, but I can't find a way in
outlook. any help?

Also, I'd like to be able to pass a parameter to the macro, but
that doesn't seem posible. I'd get round this in excel by
putting the parameter in a cell somewhere, but I don't know where
to store it in Outlook.

Thanks in advance
Rob