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Recording a Macro

Adding a Little Animation to Your Life

Converting a Range of URLs to Hyperlinks

Making the Formula Bar Persistent

Engineering Calculations

Digital Signatures for Macros

Fixing the Decimal Point

 

Continuing Macro Lines

Summary: Sometimes a macro command line can get very, very long. This can make it hard to understand when you look at it a month or so from now. It is better to break your command lines up into individual lines that are easier to understand and document. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003, and Excel 2007.)

When you are creating a macro, you may run into some very long lines. The VBA Editor will handle long lines, but it is usually a pain to scroll the screen left and right to review a line. Some programming languages (such as C or Perl) allow you to continue program lines simply by pressing Enter and continuing with the line.

VBA, however, requires a special character sequence to signify that you want to continue the current program line on the next. This sequence consists of a space and an underscore. Consider the following example code:

MsgBox "Please revise the entry in A1." & Chr(13) _
  & "It appears to contain one or more " & Chr(13) _
  & "illegal characters." & Chr(13)
Range("A1").Activate

This code continues a program line over three physical lines by using the space and underscore at the end of each line being continued. You can use the continuation characters to continue any programming lines you desire. The only thing you need to remember is that you can only use the characters for continuation purposes if you place them between regular tokens or keywords used in the program line. If you place them in the middle of a keyword or in a string (between quote marks), VBA won't know what you intended, and may generate an error.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2263) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Tame Your Data! ExcelTips: Filters and Filtering provides all the details necessary to let you manage large sets of data with confidence and ease. Its information-packed pages demonstrate how to use the two types of filters provided by Excel: AutoFilters and advanced filters.
 
Check out ExcelTips: Filters and Filtering today!