Winner Board

**Tank997** · 03-21-2013, 09:57 PM

Since the "Winner Board" here does not look like it's been updated in a while. I had an idea for as contest. I was thinking of a VBA contest to see who could create the shorter number of lines of code or most clever solution to solve a question.

No, I'm not a VBA guy and won't be competing but I have seen some amazing stuff done with VBA. I have done things with the macro recorder and then cleaned out a bunch of the wasted lines that ended out with a page or two of code and then I've seen a real pro do the same thing with only a few lines of code and was amazed at the results. I don't have specific question in mind but I'm sure many of the regulars here can come up with a problem that will challenge the users here.

I would think the participants could upload their solutions to the admins and they can be the judges of who the winner is. The last caveat would be, the winner has to explain how the code works in simple terms

Thoughts?

**JBeaucaire** · 03-22-2013, 11:12 AM

I'd say all entries in a contest would need to be fully commented. Judging would be on the uncommented "short" code.

**Tank997** · 03-22-2013, 05:25 PM

Well at least Jerry, looks like he's on board with the idea

Interesting thought about the commenting in the code. There was a resent discussion on the LinkedIn Excel VBA board where one VBA "Expert" argued against the use of comments at all in the code, while others thought almost every section should have comments. I am a good one to argue either side but my preference is to see comments at the top of the code and then only if really necessary in the code. I saw two examples yesterday where I was looking for a small line of code on a web site, I found what I thought would work and pasted it into the VBE to find that the almost full page of text was actually one line of code and the rest were comments. I had the same situation with a book where I was trying to read the code for a do until loop and I just need to see two lines but had to look through half a page of text to see it. At least the colors in VBE help with dividing between code and comment.

This actually brings up something I never really thought about before, which is, can you modify the colors in the VBE or is there a good add-in that will help with that? It would also be cool if posts here in the code window had the comments in another color. I assume the posters can do that but I don't think I've seen it. Thanks again for a great site!

**shg** · 03-22-2013, 05:31 PM

can you modify the colors in the VBE

Tools > Options > Editor Format

**Tank997** · 03-22-2013, 09:40 PM

TY shg! I now see I have been there before but I made a few changes (font size) that help with my aging eyes

**arlu1201** · 03-23-2013, 03:36 PM

The users posting code in this forum can surely change the color of the text. While using code tags, they also need to use the color tags by selecting the required color from the toolbar.

**Tank997** · 03-23-2013, 07:25 PM

Thanks arlu1201, Yes, I have seen that done in some posts but very rarely, which makes me wonder how hard it would be, in HTML, to add a color change to comments ' in the code tag? Just a thought.