- The Range Object
- Using the Top-Left and Bottom-Right Corners of a Selection to Specify a Range
- Referencing Ranges in Other Sheets
- Referencing a Range Relative to Another Range
- Using the Cells Property to Select a Range
- Using the Offset Property to Refer to a Range
- Using the Resize Property to Change the Size of a Range
- Using the Columns and Rows Properties to Specify a Range
- Using the Union Method to Join Multiple Ranges
- Using the Intersect Method to Create a New Range from Overlapping Ranges
- Using the IsEmpty Function to Check Whether a Cell Is Empty
- Using the CurrentRegion Property to Quickly Select a Data Range
- Using the Areas Collection to Return a Non-contiguous Range
- Next Steps
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Using the CurrentRegion Property to Quickly Select a Data Range
CurrentRegion returns a range object representing a set of contiguous data. As long as the data is surrounded by one empty row and one empty column, you can select the table with CurrentRegion:
RangeObject.CurrentRegion
Look at Figure 3.7. The following line would select A1:D3, as this is the contiguous range of cells around cell A1:
Range("A1").CurrentRegion.Select
This is useful if you have a table whose size is in constant flux.
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Figure
3.7 Use CurrentRegion to quickly select a range of contiguous data
around the active cell.
Using the SpecialCells Method to Select Specific Cells
Even Excel power users may never have encountered the Go To Special dialog box. If you press the F5 key in an Excel worksheet, you get the normal Go To dialog box (see Figure 3.8). In the lower-left corner of this dialog is a button called Special. Click that button to get to the super-powerful Go To Special dialog (see Figure 3.9).
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Figure
3.8 While the Go To dialog doesn't seem very useful, press the Special
button in the lower-left corner.
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Figure
3.9 The Go To Special dialog has many incredibly useful selection tools.
In the Excel interface, the Go To Special dialog enables you to select only cells with formulas, or only blank cells, or only the visible cells. Selecting visible cells only is excellent for grabbing the visible results of AutoFiltered data.
To simulate the Go To Special dialog in VBA, use the SpecialCells method. This enables you to act on cells that meet a certain criteria:
RangeObject.SpecialCells(Type, Value)
This method has two parameters: Type and Value. Type is one of the xlCellType constants:
xlCellTypeAllFormatConditions
xlCellTypeAllValidation
xlCellTypeBlanks
xlCellTypeComments
xlCellTypeConstants
xlCellTypeFormulas
xlCellTypeLastCell
xlCellTypeSameFormatConditions
xlCellTypeSameValidation
xlCellTypeVisible
Value is optional and can be one of the following:
xlErrors
xlLogical
xlNumbers
xlTextValues.
The following returns all the ranges that have conditional formatting set up. It puts a border around each contiguous section it finds:
Set rngCond = ActiveSheet.Cells.SpecialCells(xlCellTypeAllFormatConditions) If Not rngCond Is Nothing Then rngCond.BorderAround xlContinuous End If
Have you ever had someone send you a worksheet without all the labels filled in? Some people consider the data shown in Figure 3.10 to look neat. They enter the Region field only once for each region. This may look aesthetically pleasing, but it is impossible to sort. Even Excel's pivot table routinely returns data in this annoying format.
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Figure
3.10 The blank cells in the region column make data tables such as this
very difficult to sort.
Using the SpecialCells property to select all the blanks in this range is one way to quickly fill in all the blank region cells with the region found above them:
Sub FillIn()
Range("A1").CurrentRegion.SpecialCells(xlCellTypeBlanks).FormulaR1C1 _
= "=R[-1]C"
Range("A1").CurrentRegion.Value = Range("A1").CurrentRegion.Value
End Sub
In this code, Range("A1").CurrentRegion refers to the contiguous range of data in the report. The .SpecialCells property returns just the blank cells in that range. Although you can read more about R1C1 style formulas in Chapter 6, "R1C1 Style Formulas," this particular formula fills in all the blank cells with a formula that points to the cell above the blank cell. The second line of code is a fast way to simulate doing a Copy and then Paste Special Values. The result is shown in Figure 3.11.
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Figure
3.11 After running the macro, the blank cells in the region column have
been filled in with data from above.