understanding syntax

[derwalroszsagt]

Programming group:

I am a beginner in vba programming and and having a problem understanding the syntax used. For example in a duplicate-finding macro I see the syntax "xlShiftUp" and don't know what the xl means. Can someone direct me to a lexicon of all these terms, one that explains in simple words what these things mean. Your help is greatly appreciated.

derwalrosz

[shg]

Excel, Office, and VBA have lots of enumerations (each starting with xl, mso, and vb respectively).

If you look at Help for the Range.Delete method, you'll see that xlShiftToLeft and xlShiftUp belong to an enumeration called xlShiftDirection. If you enter

? xlShiftup

... in the VBE immediate window, you'll see it has a value of -4162.

Or you could press F2 in the VBE to open the Object Browser, and type that in the search window to see the same thing.

Learning how to use Help and the Object Browser is immensely valuable.

[derwalroszsagt]

shg, Thanks this was just what I needed.

derwalrosz

[MarvinP]

Hi,

Another way to look at this is:
1. Computers work with numbers
2. People work with words

http://techsupt.winbatch.com/ts/T000001033005F9.html shows a bunch of words and what they translate to from English to Computer numbers.

Here are some more constants: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/libr...shaxd(v=vs.80)

The idea is that instead of putting in a line of code that is Chr(10)&Chr(13) in VB code someone made english our of it and created vbCrLf.

Here are some more constants for colors: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...8102(v=vs.110)

Example: If in my VBA Immediate window I type "?vbGreen" and press enter it shows 65280. This is the number (for the computer) that goes with Green.

As you can see there are lots and lots of pre-defined words in VB and VBA that we need to watch out for, and not use as our own variable names.

[derwalroszsagt]

MarvinP,
Thanks for the reply. I am not yet sure of how to use all of the information but I understand the general concept about numbers. I will continue slogging through it.
Derwalrosz