When developing your Excel or Access application, it’s not uncommon to need to capture your user’s domain/username for one reason or another. A user’s domain/username combination is the traditional unique identifier for a user - often captured by programmers to do things in like:

• Help manage user login and permissions
• Create a history of who used the application
• Capture the name of each user who made the changes to data
• Personalize outputs and program messages for users

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There are literally half a dozen ways to capture a user’s domain name and user name. In this post, I’ll give you a very easy method using the Environ function.

Environ stands for Environment, and refers to environment variables in an operating system. Environment variables are specially named aliases for specific system properties, exposed as a kind of shortcut for system administrators and programmers.

Although majority of these Environment variables are useless to your average Excel/Access developer. There are a few that can prove to be useful. Two of these are the UserDomain and UserName variables. We can use these to capture a user’s Domain\UserName.

To demonstrate this, I’ve entered the following function into a standard module. You can call this from a form or query!

Function getReturnUName()
       getReturnUName = Environ(“UserDomain”) & “\” & Environ(“Username”)
End Function