Benefits of creating an object (VBAExcel)

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Good day all
I note that the more experienced practitioners will create an object such as oMyWksht and then after setting it equal to WorksheetA, interrogate oMyWksht instead of interrogating WorksheetA.
The advantages of this approach escape me. Any guidance will be appreciated.

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Using an object variable improves the code performance because you don’t have to keep rereferencing the object itself. Otherwise, VBA has to validate each reference back to WorksheetA and this slows things down. When you instantiate an object reference (Set MyObject = ObjectA), the variable holds on to the valid reference, so the engine doesn’t need to do any extra work on it.

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Thank you Charlotte.

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Don,

Another practical benefit is that by declaring the worksheet object, you then have access to intellisense when developing the code.

For example, if you type “Worksheets(“Sheet1″)” and then type a period, you won’t get the automatic list of class members.

But if you use:
Dim oWorksheet As Worksheet
Set oWorksheet = Worksheets(“Sheet1”)
oWorksheet

– if you then type a period after “oWorksheet”, the intellisense will kick in. Someone more versed in Excel may be able to explain better, but if I understand it correctly, the reason intellisense doesn’t work in the first example, but does in the second, is that there are a number of worksheet types in Excel, each of which has its own specific list of class members.

The first code example references the generic Worksheets object; listing the members isn’t possible because the worksheet Type isn’t specified. Although I’m not sure of the exact mechanism, when you set an object reference to a specific worksheet, somehow the information about the Type of that worksheet, is included in the new object’s properties, therefore the list of members for that type of worksheet can be displayed.

Gary

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Thank you Gary
That phenomenon has been bothering me for some time.

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One other benefit. oSh1 is a lot less typing than Worksheets(“Sheet1”).

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As Martha Stewart would say, “And that’s a good thing.”

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I’m “piling on” to good answers already provided, but Chip Pearson has some advice here and here which you may find useful, Don.

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As far as I’m concerned this is just a bug in the VBE. There are different SHEETS, bot there is only one WORKSHEET object.

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Jan Karel,

Thanks for clarifying. That certainly is a strategically inconvenient bug! – the lack of intellisense for that central object, makes Excel VBA more user-unfriendly than it needs to be, at least until you learn to set that object reference.

Gary

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