Working with Selenium on VBA

Generally, VBA correspond with Internet Explorer when it comes web automation. Selenium provides a way to communicate with other browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge etc.

This article will tell you how to setup Selenium to use with VBA.

Selenium provides easier way to communicate with Browser(s) and provide pre-defined methods and properties we can use to do web automation.

Installing Selenium Basic

Here is the link you can use the download the selenium Basic.

https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/selenium-vba/SeleniumWrapperSetup-1.0.17.0.exe

When we install Selenium Basic, it will also download the Web Driver, but when browser(chrome) get an update, we will need to download the latest web driver

Installing the latest web driver for chrome

Here is how you will know which version of web driver you need to download.

First, Check the version of chrome –

Click on “About Google Chrome” in Chrome Menu – > Help menu, this will bring the next screen

Now you see the chrome version you need to download the web driver for.

Now you visit the link here

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads

this link will take you this page showing below. Here you can download the matching version.

Once the chromedriver.exe file is downloaded you need to put it in a special folder at this path.

C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\appdata\local\seleniumbasic

Notice that, there will already be a chromedriver.exe file, you will need to replace that with new one.

At this point. Your installation is complete.

How to use Selenium with VBA.

Once selenium and web driver are ready. We will need to connect VBA with selenium library. This is how you will do it.

Open VBE -> Tools -> Reference

And select “Selenium Type Library” then hit Ok.

Once reference library is added, you can create object of any web browser you want.

In the example given below. This program will open google.com and search for itchat.in and will open itchat.in from the search results.

Sub StartChrome()      

   ‘– Declare webdriver variable
   Dim objChrome As WebDriver 

   ‘–Declare the elements we need
   Dim objSearchButton As WebElement
   Dim objSearchBox As WebElement
   Dim objLink As WebElement 

   ‘– Start Chrome with website
   Set objChrome = New WebDriver
   objChrome.Start “Chrome”

   ‘– Navigate the website we want
   objChrome.Get “https://www.google.com”
   objChrome.Wait 5000  

   ‘– Get object of SearchBox
   Set objSearchBox = objChrome.FindElementByClass(“gLFyf”)

   objSearchBox.Clear

   ‘–Enter value in Search box
   objSearchBox.SendKeys “www.itchat.in”  

   ‘–Get object of search button
   Set objSearchButton = objChrome.FindElementByClass(“gNO89b”)

   ‘–Click on search button
   objSearchButton.Submit  

   ‘–Get object of first link
   Set objLink = objChrome.FindElementByClass(“LC20lb”)
   ‘–Click on the first link
   objLink.Click
End Sub

Once your program ends, it will also end the chrome session. You can do almost everything by using web driver properties and methods. Like running java scripts, scroll to pages, take screenshot, save screenshots.

This is awesome, isn’t it? Tell me in comments below.

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