Implementing Find Command via VB

Well I'm hoping someone can help me (hopefully relatively quickly :p ) with this...

I'm making an inventory system for my job. I'm not a programmer for the company or anything. I just offered to try and throw something together for them when I found out we were going to be doing some big time inventory work in a few weeks and was sick of how unorganized their system currently is.

What I've come up with is basically a visual layout (like a blueprint) of the room in which we plan to inventory. Each button represents a cart that has boxes of envelopes containing corn. Each of these envelopes have a barcode on them, along with some other information. We will be scanning each of these envelopes in a MS Excel file for each cart. So once you click the button that represents Cart 1 it opens an Excel file with the barcodes and matching information for everything on that cart. There will be close to 50 different Excel files all located within the same folder on the server.

There are other features and add-ons in the project, but none of any importance to my question/request.

What I am wanting to be able to do, is have a Find feature built into the program that simultaneously searches all of the Excel files, including different worksheets within the file, for the requested string. So say you type in the barcode or other details you're wanting to find, click find, it either pops up with a MsgBox or actually opens the file with the found string and has its focus on that cell or both.

I'm still basically a beginner when it comes to Visual Basic. I'm 20 years old and started with VB6 about a year ago. But I pick things up quite quickly...

Any help you can provide would be GREATLY APPRECIATED. And sorry about writing a novel here. Just wanted to be as thorough as possible...

Thanks in advance:D

Hi DigitalDesignz and welcome to XVBT! :)

Please be sure to read the posting guidelines (http://www.xtremevbtalk.com/faq.php?faq=evbf_faq#faq_evbf_rules).

Which particular part of this project are you having trouble with?
The overall design?
Searching a folder for Excel files?
Opening Excel files?
Searching an open workbook?
Selecting a cell?

We will be happy to answer any specific questions that you have but please do not expect us to do it all for you. You will also be able to find lots of examples of all of these tasks if you search old threads on the board.

Hi Colin,

Thanks for the response. I'm needing help with..... basically all of the above lol...

Aside from the overall design, I honestly don't know where to start.

Well, you say you've been programming with VB6 for a year so have you searched the forum for threads where doing these things have been discussed? Certainly all of these are very common tasks and are well talked about here.

Also, in tutors' corner, Mike_R and Herilane put together a really nice tutorial on automating Excel from VB6:
http://www.xtremevbtalk.com/showthread.php?t=135815

Let us know how you get on.
Colin

Yeah, I've seen these and others similar to them. But I was hoping to be able to somehow open the files in the background and not visible to the user.... It would be at least 50 different Excel files each containing close to 4,000 lines. So they aren't small files and opening each of them and running the find command could lag the user quite a bit...

Is having all of this data stored in lots of Excel workbooks something which you have asked for or something which you are stuck with and have to make the best of?

Something I'm currently stuck with. It would be a lot easier if I could use a database (MS Access) but they don't use databases too much there. They have a lot of secondary programs that tie in with Excel so they primarily use that...