What’s happening is that IE is hanging on the load, and then your o is set to nothing. When you step through it, you’re giving it time to load, but when it’s running automatically it doesn’t have the luxury of the time difference. Even though you’re waiting for the right response type, it’s still loading in some back-end stuff.

You can still continue to use the IE application to click the buttons and log-in, but see this answer for the best way to get your innerHTML once you’ve logged in.

im writing a macro to try and automate a very tedious monthly task, it involves logging into a website, downloading a CSV file and then doing some cleaning and rearranging before uploading it to a database.

Im stuck on one very specific part of the process and have tried multiple solutions but cant get it to work, specifically identifying and clicking the button which creates the download file,

This is the HTML for the button I need to access –

<button class="btn btn-primary btn-xs" type="button" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#download_modal" data-licenceno="33872" data-dfname="Care &amp; Nursing Homes Master" data-dfid="1001">Create a new file containing all records</button>

This is what I have so far, it works up until the for each loop in the download file sub, i’m currently just trying to identify the button so I can click it, but it doesn’t identify anything with that class, despite copying the class name exactly from the HTML, no errors but also nothing writes to the immediate window, I cant seem to find any way to access the button so any help would be appreciated.

Option Explicit
Sub Opensite()
'open caredata URL and login
    Dim IEapp As Object, WebURL As String, HTMLdoc As HTMLDocument
        Set IEapp = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")
        WebURL = "URL"
    With IEapp
        .silent = True
        .Visible = True
        .Navigate WebURL
        Do Until IEapp.readyState = 4
            DoEvents
        Loop
        Set HTMLdoc = IEapp.document
    End With
    With HTMLdoc.forms(0)
        .UserName.Value = "myusername"
        .Password.Value = "mypassword"
        .btn_signin.Click
    End With
    downloadfile IEapp, HTMLdoc
End Sub
Private Sub downloadfile(IE As Object, HTML_doc As HTMLDocument)
'download CSV file
    Dim o As Object, i As Object
    Do Until IE.readyState = 4
        DoEvents
    Loop
    Set o = IE.document.getElementsByClassName("btn btn-primary btn-xs")
    For Each i In o
        Debug.Print i.innerHTML
    Next i
End Sub