How to play a sound in Microsoft Excel when a value changes
Many people use Excel to analyze data and to “watch” data. Did you know that you can have Excel play a sound or even a song when a cell changes if you want to alert someone? In fact, you could trigger any kind of workflow you wanted. This example shows how to call into the Win32 API using Excel to play a sound.
We first need to declare to Excel how to call into the Win32 API. We also want to declare a public variable to keep track of the value in cell A1 so we can know when it changes.
First, add a module to the workbook that you will be using and add the following 2 lines of code:
Declare Function sndPlaySound32 Lib “winmm.dll” Alias “sndPlaySoundA” (ByVal lpszSoundName As String, ByVal uFlags As Long) As Long
Public CellValue As Variant ’store the cell value here
The first line is how you make Excel aware of the Win32 API call to play a sound. The second line of code is declaring the global variable.
Second, we want to read in the value of cell A1 when the workbook first opens so we can keep track of when it changes. Use the following code:
Private Sub Workbook_Open()
CellValue = Sheets(1).Range(”a1″)
End Sub
Now that we are storing what the value is and we have told Excel how to play the sound we now need to check the cell each time something on that sheet changes. Use the following code:
Private Sub Worksheet_Calculate()
If Range(”a1″) > 1 And CellValue <> Range(”a1″) Then
sndPlaySound32 “C:\Error.WAV”, 0
CellValue = Range(”a1″)
End If
End Sub
‘if you want it to play the sound every time anything on the sheet changes, delete out the
‘parts about CellValue
Obviously you can add in any logic you would like. You could choose to send an email, print the document to the printer or even using Unified Communications (UC) services (from companies such as http://www.engage2day.com) you could have the system IM someone or even have the system call them and let them know a threshold has been reached. This may be overkill for an Excel spreadsheet but it certainly opens up the possibilities of what you can do with a simple Excel sheet.