Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Opening an HTML Page in a Macro.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated August 9, 2022)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365
Excel is a "Web aware" program, meaning that it knows how to handle hyperlinks. You can add a hyperlink in a document, click on that link, and Excel opens your Web browser and displays the contents of that link in the browser. (You can also create a hyperlink to other Office documents, including Excel workbooks.) You can even create hyperlinks to different objects on your worksheet, such as a command button in a form.
What if you want to start the browser and open an HTML file from within a VBA macro, however? There are a couple of ways that you can do this. The first is to simply open a new Internet Explorer object within your code. A macro to do this would appear as follows:
Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here:
Sub DoBrowse1()
Dim ie As Object
Set ie = CreateObject("Internetexplorer.Application")
ie.Visible = True
ie.Navigate "c:\temp\MyHTMLfile.htm"
End Sub
This macro will open the file c:\temp\MyHTMLfile.htm in a new Internet Explorer window. If you want to instead open a Web page from over the Internet, you can do so simply by changing where you want to navigate. (Replace the file path with a URL.)
Another way to accomplish the same task is to rely on Excel to figure out what your default browser is and open the HTML resource. The following macro does the trick:
Sub DoBrowse2()
ActiveWorkbook.FollowHyperlink _
Address:="c:\temp\MyHTMLfile.htm", _
NewWindow:=True
End Sub
Again, the browser opens a new window and displays the specified file. You can change the Address parameter to any URL that you desire.
Note:
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (154) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Opening an HTML Page in a Macro.
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2022-09-28 13:08:03
J. Woolley
@Roger Plant
If you know the initial text in the title of the browser's active tab, you can activate the browser from a macro. For example, if the browser is open and not minimized and its active tab begins with "ExcelRibbon.Tips.Net" (ignoring alphabetic case), use this VBA statement:
CreateObject("WScript.Shell").AppActivate "ExcelRibbon.Tips.Net"
The required text is similar to the app's tab in the Windows taskbar.
To pause the macro until the user has reactivated Excel, use this:
MsgBox "Click OK to continue."
My Excel Toolbox includes the Popup function, which might be more useful than MsgBox because it will stay on top of other apps:
Popup "Click OK to continue.", vbSystemModal
If you want the popup to timeout after nTime milliseconds, use this:
Popup "Click OK to continue.", vbSystemModal, , nTime
Popup's first 3 arguments and its returned result are similar to MsgBox.
See https://sites.google.com/view/MyExcelToolbox/
2022-09-26 09:32:05
Roger Plant
If I already have an open web site, how can I jump to it from an Excel Macro without opening a new web page -and- can I jump back to the macro from the web site? Thanks.
2022-08-09 05:57:51
Bruce
Shell ("C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\Chrome.exe -url https://https://excelribbon.tips.net/index.html")
Pretty simple one line code to open to a specific web page...
Substitute the path to your browser of choice and the URL of your desired web page...
2020-10-30 05:57:29
Willy Vanhaelen
@Dhiraj
You can then also use the one-liner macros DoBrowe3 or DoBrowse4 I submitted in my post of 21 Jul 2018.
2020-10-30 05:50:21
Willy Vanhaelen
@Dhiraj
Make Chrome your default browser, then you can use macro DoBrowse2
2020-10-29 06:02:35
Dhiraj
Can this program be used to open files in the Chrome or Edge browser?
Many more websites now don't support IE and ask us to use Chrome or Edge instead
It will be great if we can use Chrome instead of IE in the above code
2018-07-23 11:51:17
Gary
Is there a way from within a macro to open a web page and then have the macro click on an option on that web page? I like to download from my solar energy web page the daily energy information that web page provides. I have built a macro that reformats the data that comes from a .csv file that I can get when I click on the "Download .csv" button on that web page (plus another 4 clicks), and I would like to include in my macro the appropriate VBA commands to do those clicks. If there anyone could provide a link that provides examples of how to do this, that would be very helpful to me. Thank you.
2018-07-21 06:08:10
Willy Vanhaelen
Here is a one-liner that does the job quite well:
Sub DoBrowse3()
CreateObject("WScript.Shell").Run "c:\temp\MyHTMLfile.htm"
End Sub
And of course you can also open a site on the web with it:
Sub DoBrowse4()
CreateObject("WScript.Shell").Run "https://excelribbon.tips.net/T000154"
End Sub
In both cases the default browser will be used.
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