title: Check for active internet connection
body: <p>Wrote a small app that accesses a bunch of search websites and puts the results in a word document, which gets run a few hundred times a day.</p>
  
  <p>It saves individual search results in a number of local folders so the next time those words are searched, it grabs them locally instead of loading the website again.</p>
  
  <p>This works fine - even though it's not quick. People are impressed because until a few weeks ago they did this manually by literally loading up six different search websites, searching, and then copying and pasting the results in a word document. </p>
  
  <p>However, our Office's internet is unreliable, and has been down the last half a day. This has meant about 400 bad searches have been saved in the local folders, and inserted into the final documents. </p>
  
  <p>When a person was searching they could tell if the internet was broken and they would do their searches later. Obviously, though, this app can't tell, and because I'm not using APIs or anything, and because I am limited to using the VBA environment (I'm not even allowed MZ tools), I need to find some way to check that the internet is working before continuing with the program flow, without relying on too many references, and preferably without screenscraping for the phrase "404 Page Not Found".</p>
  
  <p>I'm not very familiar with VB, and VBA is ruining me in so many ways, so there's probably some easy way to do this, which is why I'm asking here.</p>
  
  <p>Appreciate any help.</p>