We need a small application to open and modify files in Windows XP. I
suspect it is something that could be written in VBA (Visual Basic for
Applications), but maybe there is an existing application.

Here's the details. The app. should be able to:

Open in Windows every file in a directory.
Do a "Save As" and save the file with a modified name, which will need
to be a concatenation of the existing file name and predetermined
string.
Close the file.
Do this for every subdirectory in a given tree.

I will need the actual app., code and full instructions of how to use it.

That's it. I'm happy to provide any additional information. Thanks!

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Request for Question Clarification by hammer-ga on 17 Jan 2005 19:14 PST

Do you actually need to *open* each file, or do you just need to make
a copy of each file in a directory with a different name?

- Hammer

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Clarification of Question by techfoundation-ga on 18 Jan 2005 10:14 PST

Yes, we want to go through a directory and open, in windows, every
file. In particular, we want to open MS Office files and PDFs. If we
want to modify the name of the files alone, we would probably use
something like TotalCommander or even just .bat file. The tricky part
here is I want to be able to open, say, a Word file in  MS Word, and
Save As with a modified name.

I am pretty sure there is a VBA call to open files, we jsut don't have
the VBA experience.

I hope this helps. Thanks.

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Request for Question Clarification by hammer-ga on 18 Jan 2005 11:02 PST

I suppose what's not making sense to me is that I can't think of why
you need to open each file and use the Save As function in its
originating program, rather than simply using the OS to copy the
files. Not being able to figure out why you need to do this makes it
hard to know what to write/recommend to meet the underlying
requirement.

- Hammer

There is no all in one app such as you are looking for, that I have
heard of. What files are you wanting to open, as I could proboly help
with that. But for the most part notepad will handle alot of files. If
you are wanting someone to program such a app for you then you can
hire someone to do it. I am posting a link to some coders for higher.



http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/default.asp

It sounds like you are asking for a tool that calls the original
application for each file, even though files may be of different types
and so a different application may be required to open each file.  I
assume this is because you want to change the format of the file, not
just the filename.

Each Windows application defines it's own set of Visual Basic
interfaces (also known as ActiveX objects).  The code to open a file
or to save a file will be different for each application.  Indeed,
some applications may not even support Visual Basic calls, although
all of the MS Office apps do, and many others too.  To build what you
are asking for, a programmer would need a list of the applications
(and perhaps even the file types) that you need it to work with.  It
would not be easy (perhaps not even possible) to build a single tool
that would work with all files regardless of the file type or the
application that created it.

It might be helpful if you could also describe why you want this --
what it would be used for, in case that suggests another more
tractable way of approaching the problem.

Regards,
Oliver