Wise Owl Training - VBA macros blogs (page 1 of 4)

Announcing the first Wise Owl online training course (Excel VBA)

Posted by Andy Brown on 10 January 2020

After a huge investment of time and expertise, we're proud to announce that our first full online training course is now live on our website! The course shows you how to program in VBA in Excel, and is completely free (you don't even have to log in to follow it).

Problems with the Application.ScreenUpdating = False command in VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 June 2019

Some people are experiencing problems when trying to suppress screen updates while macros are running in Excel VBA, under Windows 10. This blog gives one possible solution.

A short-cut key to bring up the arguments of user-defined functions

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 June 2019

When you discover a new short-cut key, should you share it? This blog shows a way to bring up Intellisense for the arguments to user-defined functions in Excel VBA.

How to get Excel to read out cell values on calculation

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 September 2016

A short blog explaining how you can get Excel to read out values in cells every time that you recalculate a worksheet.

Referring to a range using square brackets

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 December 2015

This short blog shows that there is a third way to refer to a range, other than using the RANGE or CELLS keywords.

This blog explains the lesser known but better Excel VBA InputBox function

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 December 2015

There are two ways you can display an input box using Excel macros: the standard VBA InputBox function, or the much better (but lesser known, at least by this blog's author) Application.InputBox function.

Disabling Screen Updates in Excel VBA

Posted by Andrew Gould on 26 November 2015

You can give your VBA code a performance boost by simply turning off screen updating while your code runs. This blog explains how to achieve this and how to create a basic timer to test the results.

Installing the Microsoft Date and Time Picker for VBA

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 February 2015

Some versions of Windows don't include the very useful Date and Time Picker control. This blog explains how to install the mscomct2.ocx file to get it back!

How to insert ActiveX controls after CANNOT INSERT OBJECT message

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 January 2015

When using Excel, we owls have had problems inserting ActiveX objects after recent security updates. Here's a solution which worked for us!

VBA code to create a chart and textbox, and copy them to Word

Posted by Andy Brown on 03 October 2014

Charts in VBA are a bit weird: this blogs highlights some of their foibles, by showing how charts are really just special shapes, which contain shapes of their own!

Programmatically searching websites using VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 19 September 2014

I've already pinched (with permission!) the ideas of Fergus Cairns to explain ways to run automatic searches on popular websites like Google; this blog gives an update on the same topic.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 13 - Playing Sounds

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 April 2014

This part of the tutorial explains how to add sounds to the game using a Windows API function.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 12 - Managing Game State

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 April 2014

This part of the tutorial implements a state system to make it easier to determine what actions to perform each time the game updates.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 11 - Detecting Collisions

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 April 2014

In this part of the tutorial you'll learn how to make the game detect collisions between the bird and the obstacles.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 10 - Creating Obstacles

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 April 2014

This part of the tutorial shows you how to add obstacles to the game and how to make them move across the screen.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 9 - Creating the Game Sheet

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 April 2014

This part of the tutorial explains how to generate a game worksheet using code to define the playing area.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 8 - Using Class Modules

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 April 2014

This part of the tutorial introduces the concept of class modules and shows you how to use them to organise your code.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 7 - Creating Sprites

Posted by Andrew Gould on 11 April 2014

This part of the tutorial describes how to draw simple images using a worksheet as the canvas. You'll also see how to include the images in the game.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 6 - Detecting Player Input

Posted by Andrew Gould on 11 April 2014

This part of the tutorial describes how to respond to keys pressed by the player. You'll learn about the Application.OnKey method and the GetAsyncKeyState Windows API function.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 5 - Starting and Ending the Game

Posted by Andrew Gould on 11 April 2014

This part of the tutorial adds a basic menu system with ActiveX command buttons to start and stop the game.