Writing Excel Macros with VBA, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. Variables, Data Types, and Constants

In the next few chapters, we will discuss the basics of the VBA programming language, which underlies all of the Microsoft Office programming environments. During our discussion, we will consider many short coding examples. I hope that you will take the time to key in some of these examples and experiment with them.

Comments

We have already discussed the fact that comments are important. Any text that follows an apostrophe is considered a comment and is ignored by Excel. For example, the first line in the following code is a comment, as is everything following the apostrophe on the third line:

' Declare a string variable
Dim WksName as String
WksName = Activesheet.Name   ' Get name of active sheet

When debugging code, it is often useful to temporarily comment out lines of code so they will not execute. The lines can subsequently be uncommented to restore them to active duty. The CommentBlock and UncommentBlock buttons, which can be found on the Edit toolbar, will place or remove comment marks from each currently selected line of code and are very useful for commenting out several lines of code in one step. (Unfortunately, there are no keyboard shortcuts for these commands, but they can be added to a menu and given menu accelerator keys.)

Line Continuation

The very nature of Excel VBA syntax often leads to long lines of code, which can be difficult to read, especially if we need to scroll horizontally to see the entire line. For this ...