title: How do I find host specific 1004 Descriptions
body: <p>I am working on a language- (English, German, French, ...) and host (Excel, Word, PP, Access, ...) agnostic VBA-Error handling, and reporting system (using Excel as my VBA development platform).</p>
  
  <p>Lately, I was trapping a VBA 1004 error coming up with an Err.Description I never "saw" until that date. Until now, I spent some hours, hopefully not waisted, to explore what's behind that "magic" 1004 error number.</p>
  
  <p>The best general explanation I found so far (including Microsoft's domains) was: </p>
  
  <p>Quote>>> Error 1004:  Application-defined or object-defined error. This is a very common catch-all error message. This error occurs when an error doesn’t correspond to an error defined by VBA. In other words, the error is defined by Excel (or some other object) and is propagated back to VBA. &lt;&lt; <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118257616.app3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">VBA Error Codes</a></p>
  
  <p>So, my question is:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Is there a native VBA way to get this host-specific
  (Excel/Word/PP/...) 1004 error messages? (I am pretty sure, there
  isn't)</li>
  <li>Or, is there a place on the internet that list them all, these host-specific Descriptions (and I was only to drunk to google it ;-)</li>
  <li>Or, do you know any Office resource file(s) (DLL/EXE/whatever format) that I might look inside to find the Err.Descriptions strings I'm looking for? </li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>BTW, I'm an experienced developer - you do not have to <em>explain</em> anything to me, but just tell me, if you know ;-)</p>
  
  <p>These are my findings, so far:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>The VBA's error# 1004 is a dummy/placeholder error assigned a generic, internationalized(!) descriptional text depending on the ERROR_CONTEXT.</p></li>
  <li><p>A real ERROR_CONTEXT related error only exists at RUNTIME and it must deal with a real specific error. That is, we CANNOT create a specific #1004 Err.Description from within our immediate window typing something like so: Error 1004 {enter}
  This only echoes the default err.description.</p></li>
  <li><p>The ERROR_CONTEXT always depends on the VBA host we are in while executing our code. Thus, the textual Err.Description never clashes between different hosts. BUT, the Err.Number does as it always is 1004.</p></li>
  </ol>