3/9/2020 Excel Events

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Excel VBA Tutorial Part 9 - Excel

Events
l Functions ▾ What Are Excel Events?

New Functions The term 'Excel Events' refers to specific actions that a
user carries out in Excel. For example, if the user
New Functions selects a Worksheet, this is an event. Similarly, entering
data into a cell or saving a Workbook are also Excel

up Tutorial events.

Events are linked to Excel Worksheets, Charts,

Tutorial Workbooks, or to the Excel Application itself. This
enables the programmer to create vba code that is
las executed automatically at the time of an event.

las For example, if you wanted to run a macro every time a

user selects any Worksheet in the Workbook, this could
n Excel be done by writing vba code that is linked to the
Workbook event "SheetActivate".

Alternatively, if you wanted to run a macro every time a

specific Worksheet (e.g. "Sheet1") is selected, you
cel Errors
would link your code to the Worksheet event "Activate"
for Sheet1.
ates

How to Link Code to a Specific Event

s
1. Open up the VBA Editor (by pressing the keyboard
utorial combination Alt + F11 ) and open up the code
window for the object that you want to link code to.
Functions For example, if you want to execute a section of
code every time a specific worksheet event occurs,
vs 2007 you should open up the code window for that
worksheet.

This is shown in the image below:

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3/9/2020 Excel Events

2. Click on the drop-down menu, at the top left of the

code window and select the object type (e.g.
Worksheet). The dropdown menu on the right will
then display the events that are defined for that
object.

The image below shows the events that are defined

for an Excel Worksheet:

3. Select an event from the top right drop-down menu.

This causes a Sub procedure to be automatically
inserted into the code window. The arguments that
Excel automatically supplies to that function (if there
are any) are included into the Sub header, so you
just need to add the vba code to define what you
want to do when that event occurs.

Example
The following example displays a message box every
time the cell B1 in the Worksheet "Sheet1" is selected.

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3/9/2020 Excel Events

For this action, we need to use the Worksheet Event

"SelectionChange", which occurs every time a different
cell or range of cells is selected. The
"Worksheet_SelectionChange" Sub procedure receives,
as an argument, a Range object called "Target". This
stores the range of cells that has been selected.

For this example, we only want to display a message

box when cell B1 has been selected. However, the
"SelectionChange" event relates to any new selection.
Therefore, for this example, we need to check the
supplied Range, 'Target', as soon as the function is
called, and only display the message box if 'Target' is
equal to cell B1. The code for this is shown below:

' Code to display a Message Box if Cell B1 of the current

Worksheet
' is selected.
Private Sub Worksheet_SelectionChange(ByVal Target
As Range)

' Check if the selection is cell B1

If Target.Count = 1 And Target.Row = 1 And
Target.Column = 2 Then
' The selection IS cell B1, so carry out required
actions
MsgBox "You have selected cell B1"
End If

End Sub

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