Microsoft Office

VBA Examples 44
Turning off screen updating
You’ve probably noticed that when you execute a macro, you can watch everything that occurs in the
macro. Sometimes, this view is instructive; but after you get the macro working properly, it can be annoying
and slow things considerably.
Fortunately, you can disable the normal screen updating that occurs when you execute a macro. Insert the
following statement to turn off screen updating:
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
If, at any point during the macro, you want the user to see the results of the macro, use the following statement
to turn screen updating back on:
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
Preventing alert messages
One benefit of using a macro is that you can perform a series of actions automatically. You can start a macro
and then get a cup of coffee while Excel does its thing. Some operations cause Excel to display messages
that must be attended to, however. For example, if your macro deletes a sheet, you see the message that is
shown in the dialog box in Figure 44.3. These types of messages mean that you can’t execute your macro
unattended.
FIGURE 44.3
You can instruct Excel not to display these types of alerts while a macro is running.
To avoid these alert messages, insert the following VBA statement:
Application.DisplayAlerts = False
To turn alerts back on, use this statement:
Application.DisplayAlerts = True
Simplifying object references
As you may have discovered, references to objects can get very lengthy — especially if your code refers to an
object that’s not on the active sheet or in the active workbook. For example, a fully qualified reference to a
Range object may look like this:
Workbooks(“MyBook.xlsx”).Worksheets(“Sheet1”).Range(“IntRate”)
If your macro uses this range frequently, you may want to use the Set command to create an object variable.
For example, to assign this Range object to an object variable named Rate, use the following statement:
Set Rate= Workbooks(“MyBook.xlsx”).Worksheets(“Sheet1”).Range(“IntRate”)
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