Using Selenium with Excel VBA
We had to change the names of 700 students in the student information system that I'm the product manager for at work. Instead of requesting that our support team write a database script, I figured it would be a good opportunity to try using Selenium ( http://www.seleniumhq.org , http://seleniumhq.wordpress.com ) to rename the students using the browser user interface. In the past I have written VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) scripts to control Internet Explorer and I wanted to extend that approach to control Firefox and/or Chrome. Excel VBA provides a very capable environment and the spreadsheet as an underlying model works very well for a class of problems. In this case we have a list of students already in the system and I added a couple of columns to contain the new first and last names. A simple loop through the rows using Selenium calls to manipulate the user interface and then record the results back in the spreadsheet is a straight-forward VBA macro. Of course, wi