"Gary Tamblyn" wrote in message
...
Thank you for your solution, I'm not very expert at Macros
in Excel, so I don't know where i'm going wrong.

I replaced 'sub' with 'private sub' but it failed to pick
up the macro name when I selected 'assign macro' to a
button. I'm obviously doing something wrong here.


Thats because a Private Sub cant be selected as a macro
Change it to a Public Sub thus

Public Sub ShowMyDrawings
Dim myfile As String
myfile = "c:\program files\Internet
Explorer\iexplore.exe " &
ActiveCell.Value
Shell myfile
End Sub

after changing it to just 'sub' It also came up with
compiler error, Invalid use of property for the line that
reads "ActiveCell.Value" really out of my depth here,
sorry ;-)


Probably because no cell was selected
you can check for this as shown below

Public Sub ShowMyDrawings()
Dim myfile As String, mydraw As String

mydraw = ActiveCell.Text
On Error GoTo nodraw:

If mydraw = "" Then
GoTo nodraw:
End If

myfile = "c:\program files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe " &
ActiveCell.Value
Shell myfile

Exit Sub
nodraw:
MsgBox "please slect a file holding a filename"

End Sub

If I got this to work, would it only do one cell ?


Nope in any selected cell, just select a cell and select the menu


Would I need to create a loop. It would be good if I could
allocate cell B2 and C2 as parameter cells, providing the
start and finish cells of the loop, so I didn't have to
download the images in one go.

I'm guessing the images would then appear in Explorer's
download folder once they were done ?


No , all this routine does is view them you could use the
shell function to do a copy though

Suppose you had the network file name in column A and
the copy file name in column B you could do this using
the filecopy function

Public Sub ShowMyDrawings()
Dim myfile As String, mydraw As String
Dim copyfil As String
Dim rownum As Long, colnum As Long

' Get File name
mydraw = ActiveCell.Text
' On Error GoTo nodraw:

' Get Filename for copy
rownum = ActiveCell.Row
colnum = ActiveCell.Column
copyfile = ActiveSheet.Cells(rownum, colnum + 1).Text

If mydraw = "" Then
GoTo nodraw:
End If



' View Drawing
myfile = "c:\program files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe " & mydraw
Shell myfile

' Check we picked up a name for the copy
If copyfile="" then
Msgbox "No address found for local copy"
Exit Sub
End If

' Copy drawing
FileCopy mydraw, copyfile
Exit Sub

nodraw:
MsgBox "please select a file holding a filename"

End Sub

Keith