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.

What kind of technologies are available for sending text messages?

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.