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:

1. Created a new workbook
2. Named the sheets Message to be sent and Recipients and added some comments to help the BI staff
3. Wrote some VBA script that reads the message to be sent
4. Some more script to read the recipient mobile phone numbers from the spreadsheet
5. Added a button on a third sheet with the caption Send now
6. 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
7. 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!