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.

The following methods provide you with three different ways of reading a range into a collection in VBA.

Source Code

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Public Function readRangeIntoTableCollection(ByRef rng As Range, ByVal keyCol As Integer) As Scripting.Dictionary
    Dim i As Long
    Dim j As Integer
    Dim rec As Scripting.Dictionary
    Dim dict As New Scripting.Dictionary
    
    If Not (rng Is Nothing) Then
        If keyCol <> 0 Then
            ' Loop through all rows in a given range object.
            For i = 2 To rng.Rows.Count
                Set rec = New Scripting.Dictionary
                ' Loop through all columns in a given range object.
                For j = 1 To rng.Columns.Count
                    ' Read one record.
                    rec.Add rng.Cells(1, j).value, rng.Cells(i, j).value
                Next j
                ' Add one record to returned collection.
                dict.Add rng.Cells(i, keyCol).value, rec
            Next i
        End If
    End If
    
    Set readRangeIntoTableCollection = dict
End Function
 
' @Author - Alexander Bolte
' @ChangeDate - 2014-10-09
' @Description - Reading a provided Range objects values into a collection holding key value pairs.
' @Param rng - a Range object holding one or more columns.
' @Param keyCol - a column within provided Range holding keys.
' @Param valCol - a column within provided Range holding values.
' @Remarks - The index for columns starts in a provided Range, not in the worksheet.
' If for example the handed Range starts in column C of a worksheet
' and you need the first column of handed Range as keys, you would provide 1 and not 3 as keyCol.
Public Function readRangeIntoCollection(ByRef rng As Range, ByVal keyCol As Integer, ByVal valCol As Integer) As Scripting.Dictionary
    Dim i As Long
    Dim dict As New Scripting.Dictionary
    
    If Not (rng Is Nothing) Then
        If keyCol <> 0 And valCol <> 0 Then
            For i = 1 To rng.Rows.Count
                dict.Add rng.Cells(i, keyCol).value, rng.Cells(i, valCol).value
            Next i
        End If
    End If
    
    Set readRangeIntoCollection = dict
End Function
 
' @Author - Alexander Bolte
' @ChangeDate - 2014-10-09
' @Description - Reading a provided Range objects values into a collection.
' @Param rng - a Range object holding one column.
' @Returns a collection of type VBA.Collection holding all values
' from the first column in provided Range object.
Public Function readRangeIntoVbaCollection(ByRef rng As Range) As VBA.Collection
    Dim i As Long
    Dim dict As New VBA.Collection
    
    If Not (rng Is Nothing) Then
        For i = 1 To rng.Rows.Count
            If rng.Rows(i).Hidden = False Then
                dict.Add Trim(rng.Cells(i, 1).value)
            End If
        Next i
    End If
    
    Set readRangeIntoVbaCollection = dict
End Function

 

 

If you have to write an ado db recordset into an Excel worksheet, you have two basic options.

Either you write a recordset object using Excel API function copyFromRecordset or you write the data implementing an own method looping through all records.

However calling the function copyFromRecordset is pretty fast compared to looping through all records, it opposes the risk of incorrectly formatted data in a target worksheet. Root cause for this is the often failing attempt of ADO to guess a data type of a column in a source worksheet based on the first few records.

You can switch some optional parameter in a connection string called IMAX in order to have ADO take all records of a field in a recordset into account before guessing a field type, but this will lead only to incredible bad performance.

On top of that ADO is still likely to fail in guessing a field type of an Excel column even, if you use IMAX.

Handling of Date values can become very annoying. Especially, if Excel always thinks it knows better than the programmer or user *sigh*! Automation is meant to help people, not mess up their work.

In order to help me at least displaying date values in the correct format I implemented a little function to get a pattern string based on a users system locale settings.

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' @Author - Alexander Bolte
' @Change Date - 2013-12-14
' @Description - Determines the date format of the system the application is running on.
' The Excel application is getting the date seperator and the format of date values
' from the systems locale settings.
' @Returns - A String holding literals for Day (dd), Month (mm) and Year (yyyy)
' in the order corresponding the systems locale setting separated using the locales date separator.
Function getDateFormat() As String
    Dim dateFormat As String
    Dim datOrder As Integer
    Dim datSeparator As String
    
On Error GoTo err_handler:
    
    datOrder = Application.International(xlDateOrder)
    datSeparator = Application.International(xlDateSeparator)
    
    If datOrder = 0 Then
        dateFormat = "mm" & datSeparator & "dd" & datSeparator & "yyyy"
    ElseIf datOrder = 1 Then
        dateFormat = "dd" & datSeparator & "mm" & datSeparator & "yyyy"
    ElseIf datOrder = 2 Then
        dateFormat = "yyyy" & datSeparator & "mm" & datSeparator & "dd"
    End If
    
err_handler:
    If Err.Number <> 0 Then
        Err.Clear
    End If
    getDateFormat = dateFormat
End Function