Access VBA API cannot access files on Windows 8

Question

Solution: Turns out this win 8 machine was hiding known file extensions. Both of my test files ended up being testing.txt.txt and testing.pdf.pdf which of course would fail when I tried to find testing.txt.

For some reason any part of the VBA api that does file operations fails on my system running windows 8, but succeeds on windows 7 (both running Access 2013).

I was trying to use the FollowHyperlink method as a simple way to open a .pdf file. So I started simple:

FollowHyperlink "C:\TestingFolder" - Yields an explorer window opened to the path (great!) FollowHyperlink "C:\TestingFolder\foo.pdf" - Yields Error 490 Cannot open the specified file

So then I tried the Filelen function and got another error that it could not access the file.

I ended up at the conclusion that any operation that actually accessed a file would fail, likely due to some security setting. The fact it works on Windows 7 and not 8 seems to indicate that something at the OS level may be at fault.

Resolutions I tried:

• Ran Access explicitly as administrator
• Moved files into user directories and out of root
• Went into the Access Trust Center and disabled all security measures (temporarily)
• Tried different file types (.pdf, .txt)

Answer 1

Turns out this win 8 machine was hiding known file extensions. Both of my test files ended up being testing.txt.txt and testing.pdf.pdf which of course would fail when I tried to find testing.txt.

Answer 2

Your problem is not the Windows API, but the installation of the software. The FollowHyperlink, uses the system registry where the file type association is involved. If PDF files are associated with Adobe Reader and you have it installed and made PDF to be, by default open with Adobe then you will not have a problem. However if your system lacks the program that could open a file with a "creepy" extension then it will fail miserably.

Your solution is to find the appropriate program to open the file. Then use the code, it will open the appropriate file with its associated program.