Internet Explorer Automation (IE) using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)

IE Automation

Is very demanded using basic script to perform a repeated job, it can be updating your stock details on regularly or scraping personal information of your group members like Name, phone numbers, emails etc. In this article I will take you through a basic IE automation tour where you will learn basic steps to be performed to automate Internet Explorer. In this article I am doing followings with the help of code:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Navigate Google page
3. Locate search text box and put “VBAOVERALL” in
4. Click on search button

Prerequisites

1. Any Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook) application
2. Internet Explorer version 8 or higher (not Edge)

Step 1: Insert a module and name it as “modIEAutomation“. Then Put a procedure name it “Scrapping“, you can choose name as per your wish.

Step 2: Open Google home page by typing in the browser as “https://www.google.com”

Step 3: Right click on search text box and click on Inspect button as shown below (this example refers Google Chrome)

A console opens with highlighting the code written behind to build the Text Control that we need to grab and automate. Look for the “name” attribute in the highlighted tag and copy its value and keep it a side.

Repeat the same action for Search button and capture the “name” attribute’s value and keep it a side.

Note: some sites are dynamic and you may not be able to find name attributes in the tag but you can try other attributes like Tag name itself or ClassName and so on.

Step 4: Open VBA editor and do followings:

1. Navigate Tools menu
2. Click on References… (refer figure 1.1)
3. Check following libraries and click OK (refer figure 1.2)
   • Microsoft HTML Object Library
   • Microsoft Internet Controls

Microsoft HTML Library: offers various object to hold and manipulate HTML controls available on a web page like TextBox, List, Combobox, Table, Popups etc.

Microsoft Internet Controls: has capability to deal with Internet Windows like resize, minimize, maximize, open, close etc.

Step 5: As mentioned above steps following code will do the job for you:

Public Sub Scrapping()
    Dim IE As InternetExplorer
    Dim oDoc As HTMLDocument
    
    'Instantiate IE
    Set IE = New InternetExplorer
    
    'Visble Internet Explorer
    IE.Visible = True
    
    'Navigate url
    IE.navigate "https:\\www.google.com"
    
    'Wait until IE is loading
    Do While IE.readyState < 4
        DoEvents
    Loop
    
    'Get page into a document object
    Set oDoc = IE.document
    'locate google search textbox
    oDoc.getElementsByName("q").Item(0).Value = "VBAOVERALL"
    
    'Locate button to perform search
    Dim iElms As IHTMLElementCollection
    Set iElms = oDoc.getElementsByTagName("input")
    
    Dim elm As IHTMLElement
    'Iterate each input tag and look for classname
    For Each elm In iElms
        If elm.className = "gNO89b" Then
            'Click on btn
            elm.Click
        End If
    Next elm
    
    'Close internet explorer
    IE.Quit
End Sub

Output

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