Dropping that little telephone icon on the form was designed to act like most of the other objects at your disposal, but it had an additional footgun all its own.
It depended on the existence of the RS-232 Communication Port object, MSCOMM32.OCX. Which often turned up missing :\
Plus unlike most of the other activex objects, mscomm32 had a certificate that was set to expire, and in only about 5 years, but loads of people never knew it until about 5 years later when it happened, and it's been a shitshow ever since Windows XP.
Just searched a bit and the situation may be looking up:
You may still need to "locate" a suitable version of mscomm32.ocx since there are probably more expired versions in archives than there are acceptable files which will register properly.
This may be one, still referred to as a trick at the time:
It depended on the existence of the RS-232 Communication Port object, MSCOMM32.OCX. Which often turned up missing :\
Plus unlike most of the other activex objects, mscomm32 had a certificate that was set to expire, and in only about 5 years, but loads of people never knew it until about 5 years later when it happened, and it's been a shitshow ever since Windows XP.
Just searched a bit and the situation may be looking up:
https://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?897698-MSCOMM32-OCX-...
You may still need to "locate" a suitable version of mscomm32.ocx since there are probably more expired versions in archives than there are acceptable files which will register properly.
This may be one, still referred to as a trick at the time:
https://github.com/davidanger/MSCOMM32
You may need to copy mscomm32.ocx to additional Windows folders and register the file there for different versions of Windows and/or Office too.