Update: As of Sept 3rd, 2010, this code or approach no longer works. Twitter has taken themselves too seriously to disable a working protocol in lieu of complicated oAuth. I am keeping the post intact for amusement and knowledge of xmlhttp works.
Twitter is fun. You can stay in touch with your friends and followers, 140 characters at a time.
Out of curiosity I opened the twitter api documentation today to see if it is possible to build an excel based desktop client to post messages to twitter.
It turns out that, doing this using twitter api is relatively simple. So I went ahead and built an excel sheet using which you can post messages to your twitter account. Interested? Read on
Create a new MS Excel file and make a data entry form like this
You can insert the button using form controls. Go to menu > view > toolbars and select “forms”.
Now select the button control and draw it on your sheet.
Excel will show a dailog asking which macro to run when that button is pressed. Enter the name as “tweetThis” or something cool.
Make sure you adjust the text color of password field same as background. That way your colleague (say hello to her from PHD) cannot look over your shoulder and know your twitter password.
PS: if you are using Excel 2007, form controls will be available in “Developer” tab of ribbon. If you don’t see developer tab, you must turn it on from “excel options”. Press office button and select excel options. I guess the option will be in “Advanced” area.
Create named ranges for your data
(this step is not mandatory)
We need just 3 fields of data to post a message to your twitter account. User name, Password and Message . Select each of the 3 cells and create named ranges for them. Name them something meaningful like “tusername”, “tpasswd” and “tmessage”. To create a name for selected cell, just press menu > insert > name > define (press the create name button in excel 2007)
Now, the fun part, writing macro code to post your message to twitter
The actual code is no geek stuff. We will use XMLHTTP object to do our work.
What is xmlhttp? it is the same object your browser uses to dynamically receive and send data from websites. It is the stuff behind all those cool AJAX powered sites.
First, right click on the “tweet” button you have created and select assign macro option. In the window it would show your macroname (tweetThis). Select it and click on edit button. This will open VBA Editor. Don’t freak out. 🙂
Our code needs to do the following stuff:
- Create an xmlhttp object
- Use twitter API’s post method and post the message
- Get the status and display it in debug window (just so that we would know if something went wrong)
- Close the xmlhttp object
I have written the below code, but I am sure you can write your own looking at how simple it is.
Sub tweetThis() Dim xml, tUsername, tPassword, tStatus, tResult Set xml = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP") 'get the username entered by you in named range tusername tUsername = Range("tusername") 'get the password entered by you innamed rangetpasswd tPassword = Range("tpasswd") 'get the message entered by you innamed range tmessage tStatus = Range("tmessage")xml.Open "POST", "http://" & tUsername & ":" & tPassword & "@twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=" & tStatus, False xml.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "content=text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" xml.Send tResult = xml.responsetext 'you can view Twitter’s response in debug window Debug.Print tResult Set xml = Nothing End Sub
Finally, enter your user name and password and a test message and test your code
If everything is fine, you should be able to tweet from that spreadsheet. Here is a sample message if you don’t know what to tweet:
Wow, http://chandoo.org/wp just posted a cool new way to make your own twitter client
You can easily extend this code to check someones status message, DM or message someone or analyze twitter stream. For processing twitter data you can use DOM parser objects from VBA.
Download Twitter from Excel Application and Play around with the code
Go ahead and download the twitter from excel app and learn by opening the code etc.
That is all. Do you like this ?
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23 Responses to “Learn Top 10 Excel Features”
What it looks like if excel without formula?? 🙂
It would be not excel it would just be fancy tables in which you could just use power point. (Chandoo) would Access be an alternative?
Awesome piece of work!!!
Great article.
Chandoo - my biggest interest in the article was the awesome word-graphic at the top - where did you go to get it done into a shape?
@Rich.. thank you. I used http://www.tagxedo.com/ to generate this word cloud. I took all the comments in the original post, pasted them in tagxedo website and set up the shape etc.
Awesome Chandoo.. You need always needs coffee to start up with. BTW , how did u created the Heart Shaped picture filled with High Repetitive text in it .. Please put it on your Next blog ...
Chandoo, good article. I’ve added a link to it from Connexion – our collection of the most useful and interesting spreadsheet-related articles from the web. See http://www.i-nth.com/resources/connexion
Hi,
Just one small question. Where the hell have been I in the past for not discovering this website sooner?
I've lost a job interview recently where even though I had the subject knowledge, I was not upto their mark in Excel.
Thank you for all the free tips, guidance and for creating this forum environment.
[PS: I've just been through the site for the 1st time, and have signed up for the newsletter. You can expect pretty stupid questions from me soon]
Hy Chandoo, you always inspire me with to explore something new in excel. This data structure table is only for excel 2007 or compatible to 2010. I recently installed latest excel version 2013 in my System and experience problems regarding operating according to previous one. I'm waiting your article relates to that excel version.
Thanks
Awesome article Mr. Chandoo and that is a awesome heart shaped pic you created. Great tips as well.
[...] Learn Top 10 Excel Features | Chandoo.org – Learn Microsoft Excel Online. [...]
Chandoo is awesome..
Thanks, i got better, And i always get 90.50 in my grade card but now i get 96.50 i improved because of the tutorials you gave, Thank You Very Much Chandoo Guy.
Hi chandoo, i am intersted in seeing the video or step by step done procedure of analysing the comments and presenting in the data percentage steps. I think this one would be first step in finding out how generally happens data calculation. Thank you.
As well i would like to know how to get that black shape art of your face which i see in chandoo. I am interested in making it for me.
Nice to see the features considered by Excel users to be most useful. It might be a good idea to also analyze StackOverflow Excel questions to see what keywords appear most often.
Here are my top 10 Excel Features (for advanced users):
http://www.analystcave.com/excel-10-top-excel-features/
Thanks a ton for this it totally helped with my homework ????
Very good effort
Thank you for this. Lots of learning in the links you've provided for this septuagenarian.
Pls send me new post
Dude, your humor ? ?
Loved your work.
Hello Sir,
I am Sanjeev Khakre and i from Indore City, India , I am your big follower and i have watch your videos and learnt a lots of excel trick or function and many more . thanks so much for all of your excellent support.
Your excel knowledge is real awesome.
Thanks
Sanjeev
Your work is excellent but pls willing to know more details about the features of microsoft excel
Chandoo Would Access be a better alternative than VB?