Thread: Do's and Don'ts So Others Won't

As if that could happen...

Re Option Explicit, I always use it, just never quote it in my posts.

I don't use any VBA tools but keep meaning to look at them as I gather there are some very useful ones.

Do learn about passing values to and from arrays (sooner than me anyway, they still confuddle me).

Don't keep a bottle of lighter fluid in the booze cupboard

Dom

Originally Posted by romperstomper

(unless of course you are trying to remain anonymous on an internet forum: it took one member here 3 posts to work out who I am. )

I think I can probably guess who that might have been

I suspect it was Richard Schollar... the same point holds true for formula bods also... everybody has a style to some extent (good/bad).

Originally Posted by DonkeyOte

I suspect it was Richard Schollar.

I actually would have guessed that it way you

It was indeed Richard. Unnerved me a bit.

Yeah, it is very hard to hide from your style...

I also guessed a couple of members correctly....who had different names in other forums...

I assumed my whack it really hard with a hammer until it gives in style would have been transparent so saw little point in using a different name.

Have we gone a little off topic here maybe?

Dom

Originally Posted by Domski

Have we gone a little off topic here maybe?

Dom

that tends to happen in many watercooler threads.... just like in real world watercooler conversations.... someone else comes into the lunch room and inserts different thoughts based on what they heard when they walked in...

Some of the tangents that the Lounge at Mr Excel used to go off on were interesting to say the least, usually thanks to a certain Greg Truby.

Dom

But you have to admire his high-falutin' language.

Alright, pop-quiz hot shots. Do you re-use variables? If you have multiple (non-nested) loops, do you re-use i for integer?
What if you use a string to find a workbook name using the application.getopenfilename dialog box. Would you redefine the string after opening the workbook to get rid of the path in the name?

Examples:

Code:

Public Sub Example()

Dim i As Integer
Dim strFileName As String

For i = 1 To 4
    Debug.Print i
Next i

For i = 8 To 4 Step -1
    Debug.Print i
Next i

strFileName = Application.GetOpenFilename(Title:="Please Choose a file to Open.")
Workbooks.Open strFileName
strFileName = ActiveWorkbook.Name

End Sub

Personally, I wouldn't re-use a variable even in separate loops. If I ever needed to use multiple loops in code they would be doing different things, so I'd differentiate them to avoid any confusion. If this was 40 years ago and memory allocation was more of an issue, perhaps.

I reuse scratch variables if their scope of use is within a few lines of code, and I identify them as such in the declaration (I comment all my variable declarations as to purpose when I'm not just playing with my computer).

For variables that index arrays, I name them consistent with the array; iChr indexes asChr, which has nChr elements.

I wouldn't reuse your string variable below because in the first case it's a path and filename, and in the second, just the filename.