I have a suite of excel spreadsheets that plan and run my production.

I have a new Filemaker database for my quality documents. (my new IT guy is filemaker mad)

I want to trigger printing the quality documents from my excel spreadsheets.

I dont reaaly want to convert my production plan over to filemaker as it works perfectly and everyone in teh business is used to it.

Can it be done?

If so how?

Thanks

Roger

Unfortunately FM does not accept DDE comands from external applications. It does send them though. Maybe you could use FM to send comands to the excel spreadsheets instead. I have had quite a bit of success with using FM to execute commands in excel. Virtually any excel macro command can be executed through DDE execute from FM. Excel's limitation is 200 commands in a single DDE transfer. You can always execute a second DDE if you require more to produce your reports.

You can use VB to control filemaker with ActiveX.

Reed,

I have not ventured quite that far yet but would be very interested to learn. Do you know where I can find some resources on the subject?

There is some information on Filemaker ActiveX in the Filemaker help. I don't know if there are any books on the subject, but there are obviously many books on Visual Basic in general. I've not ventured too far down this path, since most of what I want to do to extend FM has been possible with shell scripts, perl, and AutoIt.