Excel VBA

This category will hold articles regarding developement in Excel VBA. It will serve as a wiki and an Excel VBA Framework for myself.

Some development tasks reoccur for every customer. Since I am a lazy bum it will be nice to have a central source where I can reuse source code from.

Below function displays a file picker dialog and returns the picked file path as String.

Source Code

' @Author - Alexander Bolte
' @ChangeDate - 2014-10-09
' @Description - Displaying a Windows explorer standard file picker dialog to user and returning picked file path as String.
' @Returns - A String holding a full file path. If user aborted file picker dialog the returned String is empty("").
Public Function getSingleFilePath() As String
Dim myFileDialog As FileDialog
Dim filePath As String

' Search for file.
Set myFileDialog = Application.FileDialog(msoFileDialogFilePicker)
myFileDialog.InitialView = msoFileDialogViewDetails

' Prompt dialog to user.
If myFileDialog.Show = -1 Then
filePath = myFileDialog.SelectedItems.Item(1)
End If

getSingleFilePath = filePath
End Function

Saving an Excel workbook is a rather simple task. However you have to regard many things in IO operations, which can go wrong.

Therefore it is always good to  add some extra exception handling for IO operations that are likely to fail.

Hence, although saving a workbook requires only one line of code I use below method for saving workbooks.

Source Code

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' @Author - Alexander Bolte
' @ChangeDate - 2014-10-26
' @Description - Saving handed workbook under provided path.
' @Param wrk - an initialized object of type Workbook.
' @Param trgPath - a String holding the target path the handed workbook to be saved to.
' @Returns - true, if the Workbook has been saved successfully, else false.
' @Remarks - the workbook is handed by reference. Therefore the calling function has to take care of closing it properly after has been saved.
' This function is only saving a handed workbook.
Public Function saveWorkbook(ByRef wrk As Workbook, ByVal trgPath As String) As Boolean
    Dim isSaved As Boolean
    
    On Error GoTo errHandle:
    
    wrk.SaveAs trgPath
    isSaved = True
    
errHandle:
    If Err.Number <> 0 Then
        Err.Clear
    End If
    
    saveWorkbook = isSaved
End Function 

In one of my projects I had to read all worksheet names from several Excel files.

Here is the code for getting all worksheet names from a closed or already opened Excel file.

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' @Author - Alexander Bolte
' @Change Date - 26.12.2013
' @Description - Creates a list of all sheet names in workbook available under given file path.
' @Param filePath - Path to Microsoft Excel file the sheet name collection should be created from.
' @Returns - VBA.Collection holding all sheet names from given Microsoft Excel file.
Public Function getSheetNames(ByVal filePath As String) As VBA.Collection
    Dim wrk As Workbook
    Dim sheetNames As New VBA.Collection
    
    On Error GoTo errHandle:
    
    Set wrk = getOpenedWorkbook(filePath)
    If wrk Is Nothing Then
        Set wrk = Application.Workbooks.Open(filePath)
    End If
    ' Get the sheet names for one file.
    Set sheetNames = getSheetNamesFromWorkbook(wrk)
    ' Close workbook without saving.
    wrk.Close False
    
errHandle:
    If Err.Number <> 0 Then
        Err.Clear
    End If
    Set wrk = Nothing
    
    Set getSheetNames = sheetNames
End Function

Referenced Functions can be found below. 

getSheetNamesFromWorkbook(wrk)
Getting all sheet names from a workbook
getOpenedWorkbook(filePath)
Getting an opened Excel workbook