I wrote a KwikOpen addin that I use about a million times a day. I ran into a little nagging problem. When I Save As’d a file from the addin, it never showed up on the recently opened list. I finally decided to track down the bug. A while back, I switched my custom class storage method from Collection to Dictionary. I don’t remember why, but I’m sure it was a fine reason. I ended up with this Add method

I have this optional argument, bToTop, so I can add it to the front of the list. But as you can see from the commented code at the bottom, that argument is basically ignored. Dictionaries don’t allow you to insert values into specific locations and that code no longer works.

So why a bug? Because I only store the most recent 2,000 files, and I’m at that limit, any Save As’d file would become 2,001 and not written to disk. When I’d go to open a file, it would read in from the file again and, of course, that recently saved file was not there.

Surely there’s a quick and easy method for pushing something to the top. Nope. All I could find was rewriting the whole Dictionary.

In that code, I create a temporary Dictionary, dcTemp, put my Save As’d file in first, then fill in the rest, finally replacing the old Dictionary with the temporary one. That’s not exactly elegant, but it gets the job done. I tested it and found that the recently saved file was not on the top of the list. It was near the top, but I inserted it first, it should be at the top. Then I remembered that I read in Excel’s MRU before I read in my file. That means there are 50 files ahead of the one I just saved. No biggie, but it gave me an idea.

Instead of recreating the Dictionary, why don’t I just add it to the MRU? There are some websites about adding entries to the registry but that won’t work. Excel reads the registry when it opens and I wasn’t about to close and reopen the app. Another way to add a file to the MRU are to specify the arguments in the Open and SaveAs methods. I am saving a file. Now my Add method looks like this

The heavy lifting is done when I save the file

That lone True out there is the AddToMru argument. By getting rid of the .Execute method and doing the SaveAs myself, I also got rid of a problem where overwriting an existing file caused two warning prompts. Now there’s no need for me to add it to my list (the commented out code at the bottom) because Excel adds it to its list and that’s what I read first.

A year and a half ago, I decided that I was going to make a change to my KwikOpen add-in to get rid of recent files that no longer exist. Well, I finally got it done. No, it didn’t take that long to implement. The performance of the add-in has been fine so there wasn’t a pressing need. The other day, the addin seemed a little less peppy than usual and I thought it was time for a look.

I had 2,368 files in my MRU and 465 of them are dead links. That’s about 20% and it’s similar to the proportion I saw back in February 2015. Of the three options I listed at the bottom of my previous post, I chose none of them. Instead, I weeded out some files as I wrote them back out to disk.

The file names are written to the file with the most recent at the top – sort of. Because I’m using the built-in MRU as well as my own, it’s not exactly that way, but it’s close enough for government work. Instead of time stamping the entries, I decided to dump any nonexistent files that were near the bottom of the list. If a file is in the top 90% of the list, it stays regardless of whether it exists. If it’s in the bottom 10%, it only stays if it’s still where it was.

Looking at the last 100 or so files, they’re mostly from 2014. I could cap this at 2,000 and probably not notice.

I have several years of vendor invoices, in text file format, in some directories on a share. I need to search through these text files to find an order number, manifest number, or some other piece of information. I can’t search everything because it would take too long. And I don’t have control over the server, so if there is some indexing that could be done, I can’t do it. I’m stuck with good old VBA.

The folders are yyyymmdd (ex: 20150725 for July 25th) and corresponds to the invoice dates for any invoices in the file. Each file starts with a three letter abbreviation of the vendors name. Invoice date and vendor name are the only two pieces of information I can use to limit the search. The final piece of information is, of course, the search term. Here’s what the form looks like

I have a table of vendors and codes to populate the Vendor combobox. The QuickDate combobox populates the Date Range textboxes and contains common date ranges, namely, Last Month, This Month, Last Quarter, This Quarter, Last Year, This Year. I can change the dates to whatever I want if there isn’t a Quick Date that suits me. The Search Terms textbox takes a space separated list of terms to search for.

And now the fun part. The code. This converts the Quick Dates into real dates

This makes sure a real date is entered, but provides for 6 or 8 digit date entry.

And the big one, the actual search. This is pretty long and needs to be refactored, but it works for now.

It takes about 60 seconds per month to search the files. That’s a long time so it’s necessary to entertain the user while he waits. The top entry in the results listbox is whatever the current file is. It rapidly changes the display as it loops through the folder. When there’s a hit, that file becomes the second entry and any prior hits move down. This little animation lets the user know that it’s still working and gives him a list of what hits have been found already.

You can download SearchTextFiles.zip

A little less than a year ago, I said

Why 1,000 files? I don’t know. We’ll see how the performance holds up. I’ve been using it for three days and my text file is only up to 58 files – the 50 Excel stores plus eight additional. I guess it will take a bit longer to get to 1,000 than I thought, but I think it will be clear when there are too many and I can pare it down.

I hit 1,000 files a few days ago. Performance? Not even an issue. I upped it to 2000 and have been humming along nicely. The only downside is when I’m not on my machine and have to navigate the File Open dialog like an animal.

I know there are some files in my MRU that no longer exist. I didn’t try to delete them, I just let them stay in the list until I tried to open one and it said it didn’t exist. At the point, the code would allow me to navigate to its new location. I wanted to see how many files were no longer there.

This told me that it couldn’t find 234 files. That’s a lot. I really need a way to weed those files out of my MRU.

When I first wrote this code, I checked to see if the file existed before I added it to the listbox on the userform. If the file didn’t exist at that location, it didn’t get added to the listbox. If it didn’t get added to the listbox, it didn’t get written back out to the MRU. This culled the list nicely, but presented a problem pretty early on. A couple of days into using my new creation, I typed in a file name that I new I had recently opened. I didn’t remember that I moved that file to a different file. Of course, I go no results when I typed in the name even though I was certain I should have.

Once I realized why, I decided that having files disappear was not good for my psyche. It would be better to show the file, select it, then get a message that it didn’t exist. I removed the code that checked whether the file exists and didn’t implement anything that would remove files from the list short of clicking on them. Basically, I pushed that problem into the future. Well, the future is now. With 20% of my MRUs missing, I suppose it’s time to take a smarter tack.

I’m faced with a design decision. I need missing files to hang around for at least some amount of time, but not forever. Here are some choices I’ve been considering:

1. Time stamps: I could time stamp each entry with the “last open date”. Entries less than one month old are never deleted. Missing entries older than one month get deleted automatically. The dissonance I experienced searching for a missing file that I was sure wasn’t missing occurred because I had had that file open within the last few days. I don’t think I would have the same experience with a file that I’d opened last month. Instead, I would assume I was misremembering as opposed to being crazy. I like the fact that this happens automatically – with no user intervention. I don’t like the fact that I have to store the date. My file goes from a clean, simple list to a data structure.
2. Marking missing files: I could put an asterisk in front of files in the listbox that were missing. That way I would know what was missing and could click on them to clean them up, even if I didn’t intend to open them at that time. As I type this option, I hate it even more. Distracting myself with pointless housekeeping while I’m trying to get something done is a terrible idea.
3. Cleanup utility: I could make a separate utility that the user could periodically run. It would list the missing files and allow the user to “find” any of them that he thinks is important and remove the rest. I wouldn’t have to touch any existing code or data for this, which is a positive. It’s not automatic like the #1, which is a negative.

I’ll probably go with #1, but I haven’t decided yet.

I’ve been using this recent files userform for quite a while now and I like it. I haven’t added Eric’s comment yet (and for no good reason), but I’m going to in the next version. I don’t know if that solves the Sharepoint problem or just the ChDrive problem as neither are problems for me.

Here are my two problems:
Not enough recent files. I’m shocked – SHOCKED – at how often 50 recent files is not enough. It’s usually when I have to open a whole bunch of very similar files that I will never open again, but that clean out my recent files list. I decided to, sort of, maintain my own list. Because I use class modules *ahem* changing things to maintain my own list was pretty easy. I had to change how I fill the CRcntFiles class, but everything that consumes that class downstream just works. Here’s the new Fill method in CRnctFiles.

First, I read in the 50 Excel most recently used files. Then I read in the 1,000 most recently used files that I store in a text file, weeding out the duplicates as I go. The advantage of continuing to use the Excel MRU is that I can leverage its pinning feature. I don’t have to write my own pinning bullshit – if you want to pin something, do it via Excel and it will always be in the MRU. Awesome.

Why 1,000 files? I don’t know. We’ll see how the performance holds up. I’ve been using it for three days and my text file is only up to 58 files – the 50 Excel stores plus eight additional. I guess it will take a bit longer to get to 1,000 than I thought, but I think it will be clear when their are too many and I can pare it down.

Next I need a way to write the files back to the text file. When the userform closes, the CRcntFiles.WriteToDisk method is called.

I lazily write 1,000 lines to the disk even if I don’t have that many. I mean efficiently, not lazily. The text file is 6KB, so I’m not losing sleep over it. I would be pretty trivial to Redim Preserve that after I’ve filled it up, so I supposed I’ll do that after the alpha test.

And other than a few minor tweaks, that’s the only changes I had to make. If that’s not a case for using class modules, I don’t know what is. My userform consumes a CRcntFiles class. It doesn’t care how that class gets filled up or where the list comes from. I could change to storing those recent files in the registry, in an XML file, or tattooed to my back. As long as I can get them into a CRcntFiles instance, the rest of the code is happy.

Save As is jealous of Open. My next problem is that while I can quickly open a recent file, I can’t quickly save a file to a recent place. This is primarily a problem when I open attachments in Outlook. It stores an opened attachment in the Temp folder and when I choose Save As, that’s the folder it starts me in. Nuts to that. If you download this add-in, you’ll also see that I’ve hooked up a SaveAs userform to Ctrl+Shift+S. It’s got a few problems too (it prompts to replace a file twice), but you can try it if you like.

You can download KwikOpen.zip