Twittering from Outlook Using VBA

Recently I toyed with the idea of letting my boss know what tasks I completed in a day in the hope he actually believes I’m doing something.  I thought of sending constant emails or keeping a diary.    Something briefer was would be more useful.

This got me thinking about services such as Twitter.  Perhaps it has a purpose after all.

I do keep track of tasks in Outlook using the “Getting Things Done” method (I’ll post on this another time) using macros.  I thought I’d see how easy it was to report status updates to twitter.  As it turns out, very easy!

The following simple code sample can be reused to send messages to Twitter:

Sub PromptForTwitterPost()
    Dim lsInput As String
    lsInput = InputBox("Type in text of twitter Post", "Twitter", "")
    If lsInput = "" Then Exit Sub
    PostToTwitter lsInput
End Sub
Sub PostToTwitter(statusUpdate As String)
    PostToTwitterWithAuth statusUpdate, "someuserid", "somepassword"
End Sub
Sub PostToTwitterWithAuth(statusUpdate As String, username As String, password As String)

     Dim WinHttpReq As New WinHttpRequest
     ' Assemble an HTTP Request.
    WinHttpReq.Open "POST", _
      "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=" & statusUpdate, False
    WinHttpReq.SetCredentials "yyyyyyyyy", "xxxxxxxxx", HTTPREQUEST_SETCREDENTIALS_FOR_SERVER
    ' Send the HTTP Request.
    WinHttpReq.Send
End Sub

 

This example will work with any Office VBA or VB6 language. 

You can use this macro to use task items to get the status text:

 

Sub ReportTaskAsComplete()

   ' Extract task title
   For Each loItem In Outlook.Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection
    If TypeOf loItem Is TaskItem Then
         Dim loTask As TaskItem
         Set loTask = loItem
         loTask.Status = olTaskComplete
         loTask.Save
  
         PostToTwitter Task.Subject & " - Complete"
    End If
   Next

End Sub

 

Links

• If you want a deluxe solution for Twittering in Outlook, try Outwit

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