It's pretty easy, but that supposes that programming is easy. I'd recommend using AutoIT instead. It has commands like Sendkey to do the typing. I'd only use Excel if I was prevented from using AutoIT. Much the same way as I'd only use a spoon to dig a well if I couldn't use a drilling rig.
I've got the following outlines for both:
AutoIT method
Create a For..Next/Do Until to step through the names
Activate the ProE window
Sendkey to send the mapkey sequence to open a file
Wait for the Open File window
Send the filename and <CR>
Wait for the drawing to open
Send the mapkey sequence to print
Wait for the printing to be done
Send the mapkey sequence to close and erase.
Next/Until
Excel Method, assuming you are already good with VBA for Excel.
Start Pro/E so that there is a new trail file. Open a single file and perform all the steps you want. Include closing the file and erasing from memory. Then exit Pro/E. This will be the basic outline.
Some tips -
1) Type in the entire name rather than selecting it.
2) If you can, use mapkeys to drive Pro/E. This saves recording user errors and speeds making a new trail file if you did not get just what you wanted.
The trail file is just a text file and you can edit it with Notepad. It will at first appear to be unreadable - that's because you've had no practice.
The basic task is to create Print statements that create a new trail file, substituting the text from your Excel list for what's in the original trail file.
There's a section at the top that is the initialization for the trail file. If this isn't right the trail file won't run, so it needs to appear only once in the final resulting file.
At this point, I've sometimes wondered if using MS Word Mail Merge might not be easier for the non-programmer. However, at the end of Mail Merge, someone has to copy and paste the pieces back together to make a whole file.
As it is I created some utilities (if I find them I'll add them later) to read trail files and create the VBA program that prints them out again, which is most of the tedious work. Then a routine FOR .. EACH on the cells the names are in to wrap around the trail print statements; finally replacing the original trail file filenames with variables that are based on the FOR .. EACH loop.
If you change the name from trail.txt to training.txt (I think) Pro/E won't crash if there is an error. I'd have to look about the suffix to be certain, but it runs it as if for training use, where a user is expected to mess up and killing Pro/E would interfere with that learning.
Create a very simple trail file to start so that you can find the parts that you typed in.
