Inserting the User's Name in a Cell

Sunlim noted that when Office is installed, the user specifies their name. This name can be accessed in some Office programs, such as in Word. Sunlim wonders how he can access the user's name in Excel and place that name in a cell.

The way to do this is to implement a short, one-line macro that accesses the UserName property of the Application object. This technique is detailed in a different issue of ExcelTips:

http://excel.tips.net/T003289

That approach is great at determining the user name associated with the current installation of Excel. However, that may not be the same thing as who is using the current workbook. For instance, if the workbook is shared, it is possible that multiple people could be using it at the same time. In that case, you need a way to determine those names, as shown here:

Function UserNames() As String
    Dim Users As Variant
    Dim sMsg As String
    Dim iIndex As Integer

    Users = ActiveWorkbook.UserStatus

    For iIndex = 1 To UBound(Users, 1)
        sMsg = Users(iIndex, 1) & vbLf
    Next iIndex
    'remove final line feed
    sMsg = Left(sMsg, Len(sMsg) - 1)

    UserNames = sMsg
End Function

To use the function, just enter the following formula in the cell where you want the names to appear:

=UserNames

If you instead want to know who is using the computer currently, it is best to look beyond Office and instead grab the name from Windows itself. In that way you can determine who is logged in to Windows and use that as the user name. This takes an API function call declaration, but is otherwise relatively easy:

Private Declare Function GetUserName Lib "advapi32.dll" _
  Alias "GetUserNameA" (ByVal lpBuffer As String, nSize _
  As Long) As Long

Function UserName2() As String
    Dim strBuff As String * 100
    Dim lngBuffLen As Long

    lngBuffLen = 100
    GetUserName strBuff, lngBuffLen
    UserName2 = Left(strBuff, lngBuffLen - 1)
End Function

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (7251) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Inserting the User's Name in a Cell.