Step vs Run

Quick reference

• 00:05 Now the next thing that I wanna look at is,
• 00:08 some of the more critical debugging steps.
• 00:11 This is one of the big pieces that you're gonna end up finding,
• 00:14 when you write code, you will write buggy code.
• 00:17 It's just the way it is, and one of the most important things that we can have,
• 00:21 after being able to read code is the ability to actually debug it.
• 00:25 You'll notice in this particular case here,
• 00:27 I have my workbook Debugging Basics open.
• 00:30 This is, basically reset the schedule back to January 31st, but
• 00:34 the code cleanup changes we made are in here.
• 00:37 I've also docked my Excel window.
• 00:40 Side by side with my visual basic window, I'm going to get rid of
• 00:44 some stuff that I don't need here, so I get a little bit more space.
• 00:47 So I'm just gonna get rid of the project and properties window.
• 00:50 Get rid of the watches window as well, and let's get rid of the locals window too.
• 00:56 So, what we can see is we have our code here.
• 00:59 And what I'd like to do, is I'd like to actually go through and
• 01:03 show you what ends up happening with this.
• 01:05 Normally, when we run our code, it runs from top to bottom.
• 01:10 But what if I need to step through and see what's actually happening?
• 01:13 Well, in this case, there's actually one of the commands, and
• 01:16 I'm just gonna pull this tool bar off so you can see it here.
• 01:18 This is the debugging toolbar.
• 01:21 It will work when it's snapped up into the top here.
• 01:23 Just want to make sure you know which one it is.
• 01:24 You'll notice that there's this little step into- and
• 01:28 if we click on this guy, it highlights the first line of the sub roll forward.
• 01:35 And if we then go and say, all right well let's go and step into it again.
• 01:40 It highlights, it skips over all of the stuff that's commented out.
• 01:42 None of these guys are going to get executed.
• 01:44 But it says, I am going to do this.
• 01:49 And when we step into this one again, it executes that line,
• 01:53 you can see the marching ants are walking around the border now.
• 01:56 And then it says okay, the next line that I'm gonna do, the yellow arrow is
• 02:00 pointing to it, we're going to do a paste special paste values over B6.
• 02:04 So we'll hit step, and you'll notice that indeed it does exactly that,
• 02:10 it copies the values over, and then it says all right, the next line that we're
• 02:13 gonna do is we're gonna do this clear contents, which it does.
• 02:18 We're going to add a formula to A4.
• 02:23 We're gonna copy the formula.
• 02:27 And then I could go, hm, I wanna see something else happen.
• 02:32 Well, actually, you know what?
• 02:33 Let's paste the values again.
• 02:35 Here we go.
• 02:36 So we pasted it as February 28.
• 02:37 Now, what's interesting about playing around in this area,
• 02:40 is that i'm not bound to be working up and down the stack in a normal method.
• 02:44 I can look at this and say, you know what, I want to go see that again.
• 02:47 I am going to go back into this formulaR1C1, so
• 02:50 just drag the yellow arrow back up.
• 02:53 And at this point, what i'm going to do is I'm going to rewrite this guy again.
• 02:58 Which doesn't change the formula,
• 02:59 because it's pointing to the cell above in order to actually do anything.
• 03:03 But now, I'm going to reexecute this line again, copy, and then when I paste it this
• 03:09 time, it actually advances it to March, because I've stepped out of sequence.
• 03:12 So this is what's kind of interesting with the way this works,
• 03:16 is that we can actually step up and backwards and forwards.
• 03:18 And I could say, you know what?
• 03:20 Maybe I don't wanna execute this line for whatever reason.
• 03:22 So I'm just gonna drag down and skip it, and move on to the next line here.
• 03:25 I didn't execute this this time, and now we'll say A6 select.
• 03:30 So you'll notice that I didn't clear the contents of cell A4, it's still here,
• 03:35 and now we could say, end sub, when we actually run that, it steps out and
• 03:39 is no longer in the actual edit or no longer in run mode.
• 03:43 Now something that's really important here.
• 03:45 You guys may recall that I said this before, but I look at this and go,
• 03:49 that's a bit of a disaster, I'd really like to undo it.
• 03:51 But look at my undo stack, totally grayed out.
• 03:54 So in this particular case here, this is where it's really,
• 03:56 really useful to be able to say let's go File > Close.
• 04:00 Nope, Don't Save that one.
• 04:02 There we go. Now notice everything's going with it.
• 04:05 All the workbooks are closing in the Visual Basic Editor.
• 04:08 And now I can go and say, let's go back to Debugging Basics.
• 04:11 We'll bring this guy back up, and here we go.
• 04:12 Our code is good to go.
• 04:15 Notice all of my window frames stay the same as what I had them set before.
• 04:19 So this is really a useful tool, rather than just hitting run,
• 04:24 which will run through everything, we can actually step through individual
• 04:27 components of this particular code to actually let it go.
• 04:30 You can also, for reference, run the entire macro from this area
• 04:33 by just clicking on this little green guy or pressing F5
• 04:36 for that matter, would also allow you to do it.
• 04:39 So if I press run, it will run the entire thing.
• 04:41 You can see it just did its job, or I can step through, or
• 04:45 I can press the F8 key, which will also allow me to go and
• 04:48 execute this line by line to actually see what's happening.
• 04:51 So, this could be a very, very useful tool for going through and
• 04:54 trying to figure out why is your Macro is doing what you told it to,
• 04:58 instead of what you wanted it to do.
• 05:00 Because it always does what you told it to, whether or
• 05:02 not that's what we wanted to do or not.
• 05:05 So, number one secret in programming.
• 05:07 Anyway.
• 05:07 Big key I want you to remember, when a row is highlighted in yellow, it's active.
• 05:12 So if you want to actually get out of it, you either need to run it through the end.
• 05:16 Which we can do, by the way,
• 05:17 by saying Step, Step, Step if I wanna see it run the rest of the way, continue.
• 05:23 Or I could say Step, Step, Step and
• 05:26 I can actually stop the macro from running as well, okay?
• 05:29 So some different ways to actually use that particular feature.

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