Excel spreadsheet that sends sms
By
Peter Kalmström on March 18, 2008 in .
Our execs are a sporty lot and this time of year they like to spend time on the ski-slopes. Of course they still wanto keep on top of recent developments and one way to do that is to get regular sms messages with the data. As in most organizations the information they need exists in spreadsheets that. So how to get the information from the spreadsheets to the sms messages. Of course our analysts and business intelligence staff is equally sporty and don't like to spend time manually sending those sms messages. In comes me - in this case being a in-house developer! With a simple VBA script I fixed them up a solution that everyone seems happy with 
Thought I should share the steps I did with you:
- Created a new workbook
- Named the sheets Message to be sent and Recipients and added some comments to help the BI staff
- Wrote some VBA script that reads the message to be sent
- Some more script to read the recipient mobile phone numbers from the spreadsheet
- Added a button on a third sheet with the caption Send now
- Another procedure to actually send the Skype sms message by
- Creating a reference to the Skype4COM library
- Attaching to the Skype
- Creating an outgoing sms message addressed to the appropriate recipients
- Setting the body of the sms message
- Sending it
- Since the BIs don't want to stay by the computer to actually press the button so finally I also added a way to automatically send the message once a day.
Now we can all happily go skiing while the computers do the work!
If you want to read the source or even use the workbook as is, it is attached. I hope it comes in handy for you!
Comments
Nice feature.
I couldn't find a "suggest a feature" so i hopes its ok to throw my ideas here. As an IT consultant, i regularly recommend skype to small businesses as a very cost effective communication system. I make strong use of it in ecommerce too.
Usually, i set up several people signed in under one account, whoever answers first gets the call. this is the only practical way of having one skypein number without pbx software. what would be good, is if people under the same account could call themselves. e.g. you could have mattsaxuk/com1 mattsaxuk/com2 etc. that way you could transfer around inside your own account.
also, the ability to write notes on a contact would be great, and maybe in the future, a way of getting files like on an ftp folder so that everyone can bring up previous orders from their own computer, right in skype.
Thanks!
Matt
mattsaxuk | Tuesday, Apr 15
I have tried these macros and I seem to get a timeout error which I can´t seem to fix, any ideas??
willphdavies | Monday, May 26
Hi,
can you please explain how to do this?
'Creating a reference to the Skype4COM library
'Attaching to the Skype
Thank you
brazool | Tuesday, Nov 4
HI
I get a bug when the code comes to here:
Set objSMS = objSkype.CreateSms(smsMessageTypeOutgoing, strRecipients)
bug = SMS: CreateSMS takes a list of phonenumbers !!
theo
theoberkhoudt | Saturday, Feb 28
HI
I get a bug when the code comes to here:
Set objSMS = objSkype.CreateSms(smsMessageTypeOutgoing, strRecipients)
bug = SMS: CreateSMS takes a list of phonenumbers !!
theo
theoberkhoudt | Saturday, Feb 28
Hi again
No problems. It works fine. It seems the telephone number always must have the country number included fx. +45 for Denmark.
Theo
theoberkhoudt | Saturday, Feb 28
Hi!
Great!!!
But, how can I do to send different sms texts for each row of the "Message to be sent" to each number of the "Recipients" rows?
iomanu86 | Sunday, Jul 5