Bolte IT Consulting

Here we have two more functions, which have done me great service over the last years.

Instead of duplicating the code for switching on and off certain Excel application specific events, alerts and so on you can call these two functions before and after each function call reachable through an user interface.

Version & Remarks

2015-02-01

I've written a script to postprocess some data extracted from a database for one of my clients. Processing took quite some time and a collegue came up to me showing me on my keyboard how his wife typed in something wrong. Great! the script was only half way through and stopped, now showing my collegues input in a cell in one of the referenced Excel workbooks. Luckily I had a log file and could continue from there.

Lessons learned - prevent a user from interacting with Excel while you are processing something in VBA. Below a reference from the according Microsoft documentation for the Interactive property of the Excel Application object. Before I made this experience I always thought that this would happen automatically.

"If you set the this property to False, Microsoft Excel will block all input from the keyboard and mouse (except input to dialog boxes that are displayed by your code). Read/write Boolean."

However you will still be able to interrupt code exceution pressing the escaoe button.

Source Code

Make sure to place the function call of switchOnApp always after an error handling in the top calling function. Do not place calls to below functions in any function, which is called by other functions / subs. Else you would end up disabling and enabling application properties, when you actually don't want to enable or disable them.

'@Author - Alexander Bolte
'@ChangeDate - 2014-05-30
'@Description - Switches on all events, automated claculation and alerts in Excel. Also switches security to standard in Excel Security Center.
Public Sub switchOnApp()
    ' reset security settings
    Application.AutomationSecurity = msoAutomationSecurityByUI
    Application.EnableEvents = True
    Application.DisplayAlerts = True
    If Not (ActiveSheet Is Nothing) Then
        Application.Calculation = xlAutomatic
    End If
    Application.ScreenUpdating = True
    Application.EnableAnimations = True
    Application.Interactive = True
End Sub

'@Author - Alexander Bolte
'@ChangeDate - 2014-05-30
'@Description - Switches off all events, automated claculation and alerts in Excel. Also switches security to low in Excel Security Center in case macro enabled workbooks have to be processed.
Public Sub switchOffApp()
    ' Disable all alerts.
    Application.DisplayAlerts = False
    ' Disable all event handling.
    Application.EnableEvents = False
    ' Enable macros on workbooks opened through automation.
    Application.AutomationSecurity = msoAutomationSecurityLow
    ' Disable automated calculation.
    If Not (ActiveSheet Is Nothing) Then
        Application.Calculation = xlManual
    End If
    Application.EnableAnimations = False
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False
    Application.Interactive = False
End Sub

Referenced API

Important referenced APIs are listed below.

• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff841248%28v=office.15%29.aspx (Interactive property)
• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff837822%28v=office.15%29.aspx (AutomationSecurity property)