Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Continuing Macro Lines.

Continuing Macro Lines

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated August 26, 2022)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


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.

Note:

If you would like to know how to use the macros described on this page (or on any other page on the ExcelTips sites), I've prepared a special page that includes helpful information. Click here to open that special page in a new browser tab.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2263) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Continuing Macro Lines.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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