Ezine 214 PowerShell Manipulates Office Applications

Scripting COM Shell Objects – Launch Office Programs

I will show you how to use PowerShell to create then manipulate Microsoft Office objects such as Word.Application or Outlook.Application.  Incidentally, this PowerShell technique of replaces many of the tasks previously undertaken by VBScript’s CreateObject. 

Topics for PowerShell’s New-Object -comObject

• PowerShell’s New-Object  -com
• PowerShell Shell.Application Example
• Research Shell.Application  Methods and Properties
• Summary of Com Shell Objects

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PowerShell’s New-Object -comObject

All COM objects are created through the command: New-Object.  There are dozens of applications that you can specify with the -comObject parameter.  For example, Excel.Application or Outlook.Application

1) Create the object (New-Object)
The first step is to create a new object and then assign it to a variable, for example:

Note 1:  Observe how the parameter -comObject handles the application.  Incidentally, -comObject is often abbreviated to -com.

Note 2:  You could substitute Excel for Word, however, Outlook would not work, but see example 2 for a successful technique to see your email.

1a) Closing Word

2) Starting Outlook

Using PowerShell to launch Outlook is a little more difficult than Word or Excel.  Here is a method which gets the namespace then displays the inbox.

Note 3:  For applications such as Outlook you could employ a completely different cmdlet and call for:
Start-Process Outlook.exe.

3) Working With Outlook in PowerShell

Note 4: The script connects to Default Folder 6 which corresponds to the inbox, from there it retrieves the last 5 items which are the Subjects of the newest emails.

Other useful Outlook Const values

CONST olFolderDeletedItems = 3
CONST olFolderOutbox = 4
CONST olFolderSentMail = 5
CONST olFolderInbox = 6
CONST olFolderCalendar = 9
CONST olFolderContacts = 10
CONST olFolderJournal = 11
CONST olFolderNotes = 12
CONST olFolderTasks = 13
CONST olFolderDrafts = 16

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Summary of -comObject and Office Applications

We have investigated how to use PowerShell’s New-Object to create Microsoft Office objects such as Excel.Application or Outlook.Application.  Incidentally, this PowerShell technique of replaces many of the tasks previously undertaken by VBScript’s CreateObject. 

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See more Microsoft PowerShell tutorials

• PowerShell Tutorials  • Methods  • Cmdlets  • PS Snapin  • Profile.ps1  • Exchange 2007

• Command & Expression Mode  • PowerShell pipeline (|)  • PowerShell ‘where‘  • PowerShell ‘Sort’

• Windows PowerShell Modules  • Import-Module  • PowerShell Module Directory 

If you see an error of any kind, do let me know.  Please report any factual mistakes, grammatical errors or broken links.