Microsoft Office

Part VI
Programming Excel with VBA
n Examine an object’s current property setting and take some action based on it.
n Change an object’s property setting.
You refer to a property in your VBA code by placing a period (a dot) and the property name after the
object’s name. For example, the following VBA statement sets the Value property of a range named frequency
to 15. (That is, the statement causes the number 15 to appear in the range’s cells.)
Range(“frequency”).Value = 15
Some properties are read-only, which means that you can examine the property, but you can’t change the
property. For a single-cell Range object, the Row and Column properties are read-only properties: You can
determine where a cell is located (in which row and column), but you can’t change the cell’s location by
changing these properties.
A Range object also has a Formula property, which is not read-only; that is, you can insert a formula into
a cell by changing its Formula property. The following statement inserts a formula into cell A1 by changing
the cell’s Formula property:
NOTE
Range(“A11”).Formula = “=SUM(A1:A10)”
Contrary to what you may think, Excel doesn’t have a Cell object. When you want to manipulate
a single cell, you use the Range object (with only one cell in it).
At the top of the object hierarchy is the Application object, which is actually Excel, the program. The
Application object has several useful properties:
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n
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Application.ActiveWorkbook: Returns the active workbook (a Workbook object) in
Excel.
Application.ActiveSheet: Returns the active sheet (a Sheet object) of the active
workbook.
Application.ActiveCell: Returns the active cell (a Range object) object of the active
window.
n Application.Selection: Returns the object that is currently selected in the active window
of the Application object. This can be a Range, a Chart, a Shape, or some other selectable
object.
You also should understand that properties can return objects. In fact, that’s exactly what the preceding
examples do. The result of Application.ActiveCell, for example, is a Range object. Therefore, you
can access properties by using a statement such as the following:
Application.ActiveCell.Font.Size = 15
In this case, the ActiveCell property returns a Range object. The Font property returns a Font object,
which is contained in the Range object. Size is a property of the Font object. The preceding statement
sets the Size property to 15 — that is, it causes the font in the currently selected cell to have a size of 15
points.
TIP
Because Application properties are so commonly used, you can omit the object qualifier
(Application). For example, to get the row of the active cell, you can use a statement such
as the following:
ActiveCell.Row
698