October, 2007

Hey, Scripting Guy! In Windows PowerShell, how can I determine the number of days difference between two dates? I want to be able to delete all the files in a folder that are more than 90 days old. -- JN Hey, JN. You know, today is October 31 st and...

Hey, Scripting Guy! Given the birthday for one of my Office Outlook contacts, how can I tell how old that person is? -- JC Hey, JC. We have to tell you, JC, that you initially gave us quite a start with this question. Why? Well, when the Scripting...

Hey, Scripting Guy! I’m trying to create a process that runs a script under the CScript script host. However, I keep running into problems because there are spaces in the script path name. How can I use WMI’s Win32_Process class to run a script under...

Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I present users with a dialog box that enables them to rename a file? Ideally I’d like this to be in a loop of some kind, so that they could rename multiple files without having to restart the script. -- ER Hey, ER. Before...

Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I trigger an alert if an Access database file exceeds a specific size? -- MA Hey, MA. You know just the other day Microsoft.com posted 100 Reasons You'll Be Speechless , a Web page listing 100 reasons why “Seeing Windows...

Hey, Scripting Guy! I have a bunch of files that I need to move to new folders; the folder a given file will be moved to is based on the year, a value that appears in the file name. How can I write a script to move these files? -- LP Hey, LP. Before...

Hey, Scripting Guy! I have a whole bunch of text files in a folder. I need to open each of these files, extract everything between the <filecount> and </filecount> tags, and then write that information to a separate file. How can I do that...

Hey, Scripting Guy! We have a spreadsheet that includes numbers like this: 31738. However, this isn’t supposed to be a number, it’s actually supposed to be a date: 11/22/1986. How can I convert these numbers to dates and then, if needed, convert those...

Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I retrieve a list of unique users from the Security event log? -- KM Hey, KM. Before we tackle your question we should probably address a question sent in by another reader: Hey, Scripting Guy! Whatever...

Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I tell if a computer is Bluetooth-enabled? -- RR Hey, RR. You know, any time the Scripting Guys get asked something like this, one question immediately pops into our minds: “So where did the name Bluetooth come from anyway...

Hey, Scripting Guy! I have an Office Excel spreadsheet in which the last row in the spreadsheet sums all the rows above it. How can I add new rows (and new data) to this spreadsheet, making sure that the last row always sums up all the rows above it?...

Hey, Scripting Guy! As part of a demonstration I do on a regular basis, I’d like to be able to open an Excel spreadsheet, copy all the information on Sheet 1, and then paste that data into a new PowerPoint slide. How can I do all that using a script?...

Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I determine the percentage of free space available on the drive where a script is running? -- GS Hey, GS. And hey, welcome to another edition of Scripting Guys Trivia , the Internet game show in which the Scripting Guys...

Hey, Scripting Guy! I have been using your script that maps drives based on group membership, and it works just fine. However, I need to modify the script so that drive mappings are also based on the location of the computer (more specifically, on the...

Hey, Scripting Guy! I have an Office Excel document that includes a hyperlink linked to an email address. The text in the spreadsheet simply says Yes . How can I write a script that retrieves the underlying email address? -- AK Hey, AK. You’ll have...

Hey, Scripting Guy! I have an HTA that searches Active Directory for user accounts and then displays those user names. We have 10 OUs in Active Directory, but I only want to retrieve the users from three of those OUs. How do I do that? -- DP Hey, DP...

Hey, Scripting Guy! I have some extremely large Office Excel worksheets, and I need to insert a blank row every 240 lines; in that new row I then need to insert a formula that calculates the average of the preceding 240 rows. As you might expect, this...

Hey, scripting Guy! I have about 5,000 text files that have unwanted tabs at the end of each line. How can I write a script that removes these unwanted tabs? -- TT Note . If this looks – and sounds – a little different than the typical...

Hey, Scripting Guy! I’ve been testing your script for saving all the attachments in your Outlook Inbox , and it works great. However, I have a question: is it possible to get this script to run only against new emails? -- CN Hey, CN. Welcome to today...

Our phone numbers are stored in Active Directory as extension numbers; however, we have a set of rules for converting those extensions to actual phone numbers. I’m writing a script to create an Outlook signature, but in that script I need to be able to...

I recently read an article of yours that showed me how I can retrieve the names of all the tables in an Access database, along with a list of all the fields in each table and the data type of each of those fields. That’s a really useful script, but it...

I have an HTA that we use for creating and modifying user accounts. In that HTA we have a couple of phone number fields; each of these fields consists of three text boxes (one for the area code and two for the phone number). I’d like to set this up so...

Hey, Scripting Guy! I have a text file that has a list of search terms in it. I would like to write a script that can search for each of those terms in a second file, and then report back any of the terms that couldn’t be found in that second file. How...