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When inserting comment in Excel 2007 on Terminal Server the user is always the same no matter who is logged in

Hi,

We have a Terminal Server running Office 2007 and some other finance related programs. Because it is finance they use Excel heavily, but the only problem is that when they insert a comment the user listed in the comment (ie.. "username:") is the same user no matter which users is logged in. The username listed happens to be the user name entered when the server was first built.

Is there any way we can change things so that excel starts a comment off with the currently logged in user (Profile based), so that they can track who is making changes to the spreadsheets.

I hope that makes sense, but if not go into Excel right mouse click on a cell and click Insert Comment. You will then see the comment box appear and the username followed by a colon. it is the username that needs to be the same as the logged in user. Office 2007 has recently been installed and this didn't happen with 2003.

Software:
Windows 2003 Server SP 1
Microsoft Office Standard 2007

biggles70

Asked: 2011-03-03

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2 Solutions

LVL 19

Arno KosterCommented: 2011-03-04

You can change the default comment name by the code

application.username = "yeddie yeddie"

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To find out who is the active user, you could try out a number of options :

- windows login name

Debug.Print Environ("USERNAME")

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- activedirectory user name

Dim objAdSys, objUser
Set objAdSys = CreateObject("ADSystemInfo")
Set objUser = GetObject("LDAP://" & objAdSys.UserName)
Debug.Print objUser.get("cn")
Debug.Print objUser.get("displayname")

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- use windows API
first declare getusername function in the upper section of a vba module

Public Declare Function GetUserName Lib "advapi32.dll" Alias "GetUserNameA" (ByVal lpBuffer As String, nSize As Long) As Long

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below that, add following code in a subroutine

Dim strLen As Long
Dim strtmp As String * 256
Dim strUserName As String
strLen = 255
GetUserName strtmp, strLen
strUserName = Trim$(Replace(strtmp, Chr$(0), ""))
Debug.Print strUserName

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pick one that suits your need and replace the "debug.print" for "application.username ="

LVL 19

Arno KosterCommented: 2011-03-04

for an extensive overview of other possibilities in working with comments, you might want to have a look at

http://www.contextures.com/xlcomments03.html

biggles70Author Commented: 2011-03-08

Both responses were, or will be, good to know in time.

Unfortunately time was short and I advised users to do the following:

click on the Office button -> Excel options and change the name under popular - Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office.

Even when we removed the users profile, or got a new user to login, they were getting the name used from when the server was built. Users changed their name as above and it remains after they logout and back in.

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When inserting comment in Excel 2007 on Terminal Server the user is always the same no matter who is logged in

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