My Top 5 VBA Development Environment Tips
I hate saving time.
Said no one ever.
The key is Excel automation. Today, there are so many ways to automate Excel.
But let’s start where most of us start…
With Excel Macros and VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).
For the uninitiated, macros are sequences of instructions. With VBA, you get access to lots of Excel features that you can deploy automatically.
I’m not going to give you a step by step guide on how to use VBA. I’d rather show you how to create the perfect VBA developer environment so you can minimize annoyance and maximize efficiency.
📌 So here’s “My Top 5 VBA Development Environment Tips”
1. Change the Font — The default font, Courier New, does a poor job of differentiating between colors. Go to Tools > Options > Editor Format and pick a new font that makes a significant contrast between colors, is fixed-width, and readable. My personal choice is Consolas, 9pt.
2. Change your Comment Formatting — The default comment formatting makes it tough to hunt for some code you had commented to save for later. To make my comments stand out, I use a light-blue highlight in the background and a dark-blue foreground. Go to Tools > Options > “Editor Format” > “Comment Text” from the list to make changes.
3. Use the Immediate window, immediately — Go to View > Immediate window to open this feature. The immediate window allows you to print essential information to the screen while your program is running. Let’s say you need to iterate through tons of data and would like to know your intermediate progress but only temporarily. You can print to the immediate window by using Debug.Print().
4. No more syntax error pop-ups — Get rid of nasty pop-ups that break up your coding flow by going to Tools > Options and unchecking “Auto Syntax Check”. The environment will still tell you that you have an error by highlighting any offending script in red, but the pesky popup box will bother you no more.
5. Opt for Option Explicit — Don’t make Option Explicit optional. Go to Tools > Options and check “Require Variable Declaration.” Explicit declaration might sound like more work, but trust me you’ll save yourself some headache. For example, you might not always spell your variables correctly. Instead of being forced to scour through your code looking for the problem when your program doesn’t give the correct output, undeclared variables will result in a compile-time error, which will prompt you to fix them immediately.