How do I send an alert to a blackberry from an Excel 2007 spreadsheet?

Question

I've been asked to find a way to send an alert to a blackberry when certain conditions are met on an Excel 2007 spreadsheet. The alert can be an SMS (preferred) or an email. The cell values are changing throughout the day from a DDE feed.

What are the typical solutions that people use to solve this?

Answer 1

I know next to nothing on the specifics of Excel or Office programming, but I can think of a few ways to solve the problem generically. I'm also assuming that the solution can be .Net based since Excel is available.

• hook into the update process to test the conditions at the end of the update.
• Office interop if you wanted a separate .net program instead that ran as a service or as a scheduled task.
• Create an add-in for Excel. I have VS2008 Pro and I can create an Excel 2007 Add-in project.
• Parse the Open Office XML for your conditions in a standalone program. This solution doesn't require .Net, just an XML parser,

When your conditions are met, you can use the following link to send your SMS or email.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/53019/what-kind-of-technologies-are-available-for-sending-text-messages#53067

Answer 2

Another possibility would be to use AddEmail. Their blurb says: Email ActiveX (COM) Control - create and send HTML email messages with embedded images and attachments using SMTP/ESMTP protocol. Easily add email support to your Visual Basic 6 (VB6), ASP, ASP.NET, VB.NET, C++, C#, FoxPro, Access, PowerBuilder or Delphi application.

We use it a lot to automate our software registration system, and it'd be no problem to splice it into a bit of Excel VBA,

....
Dim oSmtpMail As New SmtpMail
Dim lRes As Long
lRes = oSmtpMail.SimpleSendScriptable(sRecipient, sRecipient, sSubj, sText, sError)
....

Okay, so it's email rather than SMS, but it's a start.