Ben’s Tech Blog

View Script (right click to download)

I was talking with a user a few days back who explained to me that in order to track EDI messages he needed to open atleast 20 messages and check the attachment(s) of each to see if a container number was included in the text file.  Needless to say it was a tedious job and took a great deal of time.  I knew that I could make him very happy by creating a script to search the attachments for him.  

I considered using VBA, however I feel that vbscript is more portable as you don’t need to store the code in a VBA module.  I created the script and then created a shortcut to it on the user’s quick launch toolbar.  To search the attachments, the user selects all of the messages that he wants to search in the appropriate outlook folder and then clicks on the shortcut to the script on the quick launch toolbar.  The script prompts the user for the text to search for and then moves through each selected message, saving each attachment, searching for the text string in the file, then deleting the local copy of the attachment and moving to the next attachment follwed by the next message.  If the text is found in the file then the message is displayed to the user, otherwise the script just reports that the string was not found in the attachments.    

View Script (right click to download)