Editing hosts file from within Excel?

Hi everyone,

I'm a bit new here, I read a lot of threads, I usually try to help myself with solved threads before posting questions (on other forums) but I could not find the solution for this yet

I have an Excel sheet with data of my PCs - hostnames, IP address and some more additional data. I would like to update the Windows hosts file with the data from the sheet by clicking a button in Excel. That is the plan, at least...

Well, I got stuck at the following things and I'm not sure how to continue:

• How to set up the macro (there are more ways, I suppose, which would be the best one?)
  1. Always create new hosts file and replace old one every time + do Shell ("ipconfig /flushdns") + do Shell ("nbtstat -R")
  2. Find strings #EXCEL and #/EXCEL in the hosts file and replace only the text in between those 2 strings + do Shell ("ipconfig /flushdns") + do Shell ("nbtstat -R") (Note: I will edit the hosts files so they all have the #EXCEL and #/EXCEL strings!)
  3. ?
• Will Excel have to be started with admin rights to be able to interact with the hosts file?

The second option would be much better for me as I have a few custom hosts specified on machines and I don't want to manually edit them every time the macro runs. The macro would be run on more different machines but with same Excel sheet - I will probably have to run the macro locally, I won't be able to do it over LAN as the file is in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc folder and needs admin rights to be changed. The number of PCs is currently 10 and the number will rise

I probably forgot something, I should be able to program the export part myself by using examples on the internet

If someone could help me, I'd appreciate any help

Best regards,
Dex

Bump

Actually, this could refer to exporting to any file in general, not just hosts

Bump

I guess a moderator can lock this, as I couldn't do it myself and it seems nobody can help me so the project is put away for... A while