Adding access to a network drive

Hi,

I hope that someone knows the answer to the following (Excel 2003) question:

I am writing an interactive process so that I can run some server activities in an entirely different application from Excel.

I have done this for my own purposes before without any problem, but this time I have to pass this onto someone else. The issue is that I have access to a network share permanently set up on my PC, but I need to grant access to this share (there is no problem with permissions, just that I do NOT want people to have permanent access to this share) at the start of the procedure, and then destroy it at the end (or on termination because of an error).

I also need to check what drive letters are already assigned on the PC that will be used to run this procedure, and map the share to teh next available drive letter.

It would be great if someone could let me know how to do both using the share example shown below.

When I map the drive via Windows Explorer I would type in \\abc1123\Alan$ and select a drive letter

Is there a reason you need to use a drive letter at all? I would just use the network path directly if at all possible.

Hi Omar,

No real reason I guess - other than that is what I thought I had to do.

If I can use an alternative method then that would be fine.

In my code I am calling certain parameters - such as L;\xxx\yyy\abc.log

so I just need to be sure that replacing "L:\" with the alternate method will work.

Hi Omar,

Sorry, but I forgot to ask the simple question - do I just replace L:\ with \\abc123 etc?

Yep, the full UNC pathname.

Sometimes, some older programs can't handle the unc paths, that's why I wondered if you had a reason for mapping the network path.

As you probably gather, life's a lot easier when you don't have to maintain drive letters on someone else's computer.

BTW, I don't have a clue about your main question regarding temporary access to a share.

Thanks for you responses.

I gave it a go on Saturday, and it works fine on my PC. Today will be the proof when we try it on someone else's machine.

Hi,

If you are using the the spreedsheet or the excell sheet to get the data over the network, then it would be better to have the same data to be avilable over the internet, I mean to say that you must use google spreedsheet avilable in the document section of google. There you can share the sheet as well as assign the right to access it. You can also change the permission any time you want. It is much easier than doing any other trick.