Working With VBA Range for Excel Worksheet Manipulation

You can use the Visual Basic functions to manipulate your Excel sheets, particularly to save time and eliminate manual work. One of the most useful attributes of Visual Basic for Excel is the VBA Range. Before you proceed to learn how to use the function, you should know more about it.

What Is an Excel Cell?

You can actually define a cell in an Excel worksheet as the most important attribute of the document. Everything begins and ends with a cell or cells. You do three main things with cells: writing, reading, and format changing.

What Is VBA Range?

The object is a representation of one or various cells in your worksheet. It is considered to be Excel VBA’s most important aspect. By using this object, you will be able to refer a 3D range, single cell, cell selection, column of cells, and row of cells.

You can consider VBA Range as a worksheet member, which implies that it is also part of the Excel workbook.

If you are confused about the cells and range, you must know that there are differences between the two. Primarily, cells return a single cell range only. Moreover, cells take columns and rows as arguments.

You must be wondering why you should still use VBA Range. Basically, you should utilize it if you want to access the same cells every time the macro is operating. For instance, you have to find out the total and put the result in a certain cell, and then the range will be useful.

Otherwise, you may use the Cells property to access a cell depending on a varying number.

You must also know that the property will accept single or dual arguments. The latter is not often mandated for use. If you are using a single argument, you must have an address string, which specifies the worksheet you are using or the range name.

In the case of two arguments, the arguments may include address strings, range objects, ranges’ names, or a combination.

What Are Other Elements Necessary in Using VBA Range?

There are other important elements you must be aware of when using VBA Range. Here are the following:

Method. This is the action that an object has to perform. Common examples of a method are sorting, selecting, copying, and clearing.
Property. This is where the object’s information is stored.
Object Qualifier. You will use this function in order to reference an object. It is responsible for the referencing of worksheet or workbook you are working on.
Address. This property is tasked to display the number or letter of cell reference regardless of the range. You can utilize this when writing codes or debugging.

Steps on How to Use VBA Range

There are steps to follow to access the Visual Basic Range function. To start using the feature, given below are the instructions:

Step 1. Developer Tab Activation

You need to activate the Developer tab to begin the Visual Basic code or function. You can do this by clicking File menu. Then, select Options. Lastly, click Customize Ribbon option.

Afterward, you need to click the Developer option. A check mark will appear by doing this step. Next, you have to click OK.

Step 2. Visual Basic Access

You have to proceed to access Visual Basic functions. You can begin by selecting the Developer tab once again. Then, you have to click Visual Basic.

Step 3. Sheet Selection

In case you have been working on a variety of sheets, you only have to select one of the documents. The Visual Basic software will allow you to develop procedures by choosing a sheet to work on.

Step 4. Module Creation

You need to create a Module to establish a project for code storage. To start, you need to type Sub to initiate the procedure’s creation. Leave space to add the procedure’s name. Note that the procedure's name must have no spaces between characters.

After doing so, you have to put another space that will follow open and close parentheses. Lastly, you need to click Enter.

You will notice that after clicking Enter, End Sub will automatically be added to the code.

Step 5. Range Configuration

You can perform this step by typing Range followed by an open parenthesis.

You must type in the range inside the quotation marks. To separate the entries, you should use a colon. For instance, the range is from cell A1 to cell F8. Your statement will be Range (“A1:F8”).

Then, you have to type the equal sign, which will be followed by the value you want to set. For instance, you can put five.

If you want to set the value as text, you must add quotation marks. For instance, you can type in “text” instead of the numerical value.

There is also an alternative syntax for the given example. For instance, you can use Range (“A1”, “F8”). This specifies the lower-right and upper-left corner values of your desired range.

Moreover, you may also select the range from the starting cell to an active cell by substituting ActiveCell to the last range [i.e. Range (“A1”, ActiveCell)].

Step 6. Procedure Test

You can simply press the Play button to determine if the macro is working.

With the information provided above, you will definitely be saved from a lot of work when manipulating your worksheet. Simply follow the provided steps, and you can manage the values of cells accordingly.