VBA Internet Explorer Automation - How to Select "Open" When Downloading a File

Question

This is my first question ever here on stackoverflow!

I've been searching for a solution to this problem for a while and haven't found any help. I may just be using the wrong keywords in my searches, but so far I've had no luck. Here's the question:

In VBA, how can I select the "Open" option from the file download dialog in Internet Explorer?

Just for extra clarification, I'm talking about the yellow-orange bar that pops up across the bottom of the screen in IE9 when a file is downloaded.

I'm doing some VBA automation to download hundreds of PDFs from the web using Internet Explorer, but there is an intermediate step where a .fdf file has to be opened before I get to the actual PDF. So I first need to select the "Open" option so that I can move on to the next step of the automation. Like I said earlier, I've done a lot of searching and had no luck so far.

I've tried using SendKeys in hopes that hitting Enter would work, and that was a last ditch effort that didn't work.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Answer 1

I sent the shortcut keys to the application. Here they are for IE11. Sorry I could not test in IE9. If you hold down Alt, it may show you the other key to the combo as IE11 does.

Note: the code will not run as you expect if IE is not the active window on your machine so it won't work while in debug mode.

• Shortcut key:Alt+O
• VBA: Application.SendKeys "%{O}"