I have an excel workbook that uses a hotkey that launches a batch file, which launches a Node script, which updates a CSV file. Technical details on that are further below.
The workbook uses the CSV file as a data source. I can manually update the Workbook with the data from the CSV file by going to Data > Refresh All > Refresh All.
Is there any way to trigger an update in the workbook once there is new data in the CSV file, or when the batch file finishes? Conceptually, I'm asking how an external event can trigger something in Excel.
Here are fine details on the process:
When a hotkey is pressed in the Excel workbook, it launches MS console ("cmd.exe") and passes the location of a batch file to be ran and the value of the selected cell. The reason the batch file is run this way is probably not relevant to this question but I know it will be asked, so I'll explain: The batch file is to be located in the same directory as the workbook, which is not to be a hard-coded location. The problem is that launching a batch-file/cmd.exe directly will default to a working directory of C:\users\name\documents. So to launch the batch file in the same directory as the workbook, the path of the workbook is passed along to cmd.exe like so: CD [path] which is then concatenated inline with another command to launch the batch file with the value of the selected cell as an argument like so: CD [path] & batch.bat cellValue
Still with me?
The batch file then launches a Node script, again with the selected cell value as an argument.
The Node script pulls data from the web and dumps it in to a CSV file.
At this point, the workbook still has outdated data, and needs to be Refreshed. How can this be automated?
I could just start a static timer in VBA after the batch file is launched, which then runs ActiveWorkbook.RefreshAll, but if the batch file takes too long, there will be issues.