Welcome toExcel.Tips.Net
Tips.Net Home
ExcelTips Home
Ask an Excel Question
Make a Comment
ExcelTips FAQ
ExcelTips Premium
Learn Access Now
Free Printable Forms
Beauty Tips
Car Tips
Cleaning Tips
College Tips
Cooking Tips
Excel2007 Tips
ExcelTips
Family Tips
Gardening Tips
Health Tips
Home Tips
Legal Tips
Money Tips
Organizing Tips
Pest Tips
Pet Tips
Wedding Tips
Word2007 Tips
WordTips
Advertise on the
ExcelTips Site
Adding a Little Animation to Your Life
Converting a Range of URLs to Hyperlinks
Making the Formula Bar Persistent
John wonders if there is a way in VBA to identify the last cell that was changed by a user. He doesn't want to know if the cell was changed by a macro, but specifically by a user.
The answer is yes—sort of. You can use the Worksheet_Change event to write a handler that will record when any particular cell in a worksheet is changed. A macro that does this could be rather simple, such as this one:
Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)
Application.StatusBar = Target.Address
End Sub
The macro simply puts the address of the last change into the status bar. You could modify the macro so that it maintained the address in a global variable (declared outside of the event handler) in this manner:
Dim sAddr As String
Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)
sAddr = Target.Address(False, False)
End Sub
You then could use a regular macro to retrieve the address stored in the sAddr macro and do whatever you want with it.
As for making sure that the event handler doesn't record any changes done by macros, the only way to do this is to turn off event handling before executing any macro command that will modify the worksheet. For instance, the following EnableEvents property change could be used before and after a command that changes the contents of cell A1:
Application.EnableEvents = False
Range("A1") = "Hello"
Application.EnableEvents = True
With event handling turned off, the Worksheet_Change event handler won't be triggered and the "last changed" address won't be updated. The result is that you end up tracking only those changes done by users, not changes done by macros.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3819) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 2000 2002 2003 2007
Don't Go in Debt for Christmas! Tired of trying to keep up with the Joneses for Christmas? Want to enjoy the season rather than dread the aftermath? Learn how you can avoid the financial traps that spring up every Christmas.