If you’ve never used Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), it is a great language to use for automating tasks in Microsoft Office applications. VBA is flexible and powerful, and is a great choice if you are building a tool that will be distributed across your company or organization.
However, this power and flexibility comes at the cost of being easy to misuse. There are many ways in which you can make mistakes with VBA, and many ways in which your VBA code can malfunction. Below is a list of 10 of the most common pitfalls that can ruin your spreadsheets, along with solutions for how to fix them.
As you will learn in this article, most run-time errors are caused by the wrong use of one or more statements in your VBA code.
10 most common mistakes that causes errors and how to avoid them:
1. Using the equal sign incorrectly (the single equal sign)
2. Using the wrong type of quotation marks
3. Forgetting to include parentheses around arguments within a function
4. Forgetting to include quotation marks around strings
5. Forgetting to include a comma or colon when it is needed (ex: between each argument)
6. Not including a space between arguments
7. Not including an apostrophe after an apostrophe within a string (ex: ‘O’Brien’s’)
8. Missing operator in calculation (ex: 2**3 instead of 2^3)
9. Not turning off screen updating and automatic calculation when running lengthy procedures
10. Not properly closing Excel workbooks or worksheets
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is the programming language used to automate Microsoft Office applications. VBA is a powerful language that can be used to automate tasks and create custom applications in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other Microsoft Office products.
This article highlights ten common mistakes that VBA developers make when developing code. Although these are not necessarily errors, they can cause your application to behave unexpectedly or even crash.
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a programming language created by Microsoft to automate common tasks. It is an adapted version of Visual Basic, and it uses macros to simplify the programming process. VBA can be run on any version of Excel and will work with Macros (which are also written in VBA).
VBA can be used to automate many tasks that you do through Excel. For example, you could create a button that executes a macro when clicked. Or, you can create a command that runs code when the user types in a word or character in a cell.
You can tell if you’re running VBA by looking at the title bar of the spreadsheet. If it says “Microsoft Excel – [Book1] (Visual Basic),” then you are running VBA. Otherwise, it is probably Java or Python.
Visual Basic programming, while fairly simple when compared to Java or C++, can still be quite daunting for new programmers. The following are a few tips and tricks that can help the novice programmer get started on the path to creating useful and unique VBA macros.
1) We all make mistakes.
2) Syntax errors are the easiest to fix.
3) Know thyself.
4) Use your tools.
5) Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
The “On Error GoTo 0” statement is important because it restores Visual Basic’s normal error handling behavior. This means that if the user presses the Cancel button, you won’t get an error message. It also means that if there’s an error in your code and you have no error handler, VBA will stop executing your code and display an ugly error message to the user.
The “On Error Resume Next” statement allows you to bypass a runtime error without pausing the execution of your macro. The macro continues to execute line-by-line as usual, but when it reaches a line that causes an error, it simply skips that line and continues running from the next line.
The “Err” object is a pre-defined variable that stores information about a runtime error. This includes things like how many times the user has tried to log in, what their IP address is, etc. You can use this information to find out what caused your runtime error, so you can fix it.
The “Error” event procedure is triggered whenever a runtime error occurs in your VBA code. You can use this event procedure to display information about the run-time errors that occur in your application.
1. Using unqualified names
2. Looking in the wrong places
3. Not declaring your variables
4. Forgetting to enable macros
5. Using the wrong separator characters in strings
6. Not accounting for differences between Excel and VBA
7. Failing to create a backup before you start modifying worksheets with code
8. Using the wrong type of loop
9. Trying to do too much with one function or procedure
10. Not using the Immediate window