Using the Immediate Window

Quick reference

• 00:05 The next window I want to show you is the immediate window, down on the bottom here.
• 00:09 And we can actually pull this one up by pressing Ctrl+G or by going to the view
• 00:14 menu and saying immediate window, and that will give us this little guy here.
• 00:17 And again, he looks inspiringly blank.
• 00:19 But there's actually quite a few ways to use this guy.
• 00:21 So first thing I want to do is, I'm gonna take a look.
• 00:24 I've got a different Macro here, this one has a little bit of data that's selected.
• 00:29 And the intent of this macro is to copy this, and
• 00:32 place it in the cell immediately adjacent on the right hand side.
• 00:35 So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna step into this.
• 00:37 And you'll notice that because we have and rng as range variable,
• 00:42 it shows up in the locals window, so that's cool.
• 00:45 So we'll step into this, and we'll say set range equal to the selection.
• 00:50 And there we go.
• 00:51 So we could drill down into this and say rng and
• 00:54 we can see that hey look there's some cells within the range.
• 00:57 And we can see that, if we open this up just a little bit here.
• 01:00 We have a count of four cells in the range,
• 01:03 which as you can see here we definitely do.
• 01:04 So this is kind of neat.
• 01:07 We can find this out another way though.
• 01:08 We can actually go to the Immediate window, and
• 01:11 we could type in question mark space.
• 01:13 So question mark says tell me something about this.
• 01:15 I'm gonna type in rng., and it give me a list of all these things.
• 01:20 And I can type in cell.
• 01:21 Hey, look at that. It says ce, there's Cells, Tab.
• 01:25 So this will tell me the cells.
• 01:27 What do I wanna know about it?
• 01:28 Well, dot, actually, check this one out.
• 01:31 Address that's gonna need, tells me it's an A3 to A6 cool.
• 01:36 All right and it's true.
• 01:38 Let's try another one.
• 01:38 rng.cells.
• 01:40 how about counts?
• 01:42 Look at that.
• 01:44 Tells me that there's four cells in there.
• 01:46 So this is kinda cool.
• 01:47 This actually gives me some pretty neat IntelliSense that
• 01:50 I can actually work with on this.
• 01:51 Because there's all kinds of things that I can actually see in this entire list here
• 01:56 that I may or may want to do.
• 01:57 And look at that, I could get into Borders.
• 01:59 And then I could go .Color or count or whatnot I can play around
• 02:04 with all of these kind of individual components if I wanted to.
• 02:08 And this allows me to question those things.
• 02:10 So that's kinda cool.
• 02:11 Now, we can see here this is rng.copy, that's cool.
• 02:15 And then it says it's gonna go to rng.offset(0, 1) Pay special.
• 02:21 Well, now that's interesting.
• 02:22 I wonder what that is.
• 02:24 Rng.offset, open parenthesis and
• 02:27 it's going to give me a zero for a row offset comma one for
• 02:32 column offset, we'll close that off, dot address.
• 02:37 Let's go and figure out, if we can figure out where this is.
• 02:41 B3, B6.
• 02:43 So I can actually start querying that stuff from here to find out where it's
• 02:46 going to go before it goes anywhere.
• 02:48 So we'll say hey, that looks cool.
• 02:49 Lets run it.
• 02:50 Awesome, does it work with text?
• 02:54 Lets go back into our window here, and
• 02:59 we can go and step through the whole thing and indeed we can see that it does.
• 03:04 So that's kinda neat.
• 03:05 Now, what about some other things we might wanna know with this one?
• 03:10 Well, there's another way the immediate window can actually be used on here too.
• 03:13 Why don't we try this one?
• 03:14 I'm gonna use a little command here called debug.print.
• 03:18 Actually, let's put it above the rng.copy because
• 03:21 we might as well set it right after here.
• 03:23 dbug.print, rng.address and
• 03:28 dbug.print rng.count.
• 03:34 Or actually sales dot count is what I think we're looking for.
• 03:36 cellscount, there we go.
• 03:38 So, what does this do?
• 03:41 Well lets go and select two cells.
• 03:44 Actually lets grab these ones here, lets see what end up happening in this case.
• 03:48 Oops let me get back over to the visual base scanner here,
• 03:51 so ALT, F11 and now we're gonna go and step through this.
• 03:56 Set the range equal to selection,
• 03:58 debug.print feeds the value into the immediate window.
• 04:03 So this is kinda cool because when we actually go and run this stuff, its
• 04:08 still gonna copy but we can see that the items are actually being fed out there.
• 04:11 Now we could look at this one and say, you know what this isn't good enough,
• 04:16 let's say let's put in some quotes and say, address colon quote &.
• 04:21 And we could put something in
• 04:25 here that says Cells: &.
• 04:30 And now, let's go and clear the immediate window out again.
• 04:33 Let's go and grab these guys here.
• 04:36 Actually, let's grab these guys right there.
• 04:38 There we go.
• 04:39 And we'll go back over to the immediate, back over to the VBA window.
• 04:43 We'll run this again.
• 04:44 And we can see that it copied from C5 to C11 and it copied 7 cells.
• 04:48 So this is kind of cool.
• 04:50 You can leave these commands in your code,
• 04:52 although you would probably prefer not to because it does take extra time for
• 04:56 these things to actually go through and be calculated.
• 04:59 Something else that's actually kind of interesting with this too,
• 05:02 is that this immediate window is actually read write.
• 05:04 So if I were to say selection.value= Hello and hit enter.
• 05:12 It will go on right that directly back into the worksheet as well.
• 05:16 So I can change things there too.
• 05:18 So the immediate window has the ability to write back to this worksheet.
• 05:23 We can use it to change values at run time.
• 05:25 While we're in run time or even when we're not, we can actually use the immediate
• 05:29 window to question the various states of different objects.
• 05:32 So one thing I will say for your debugging purposes this is all good,
• 05:35 if you wanna leave you debugging code in there afterwards,
• 05:38 you can always go through and put in your little less single quotes before hand,
• 05:42 that will actually comment the code out, so now if you were to go and copy this
• 05:46 particular guy here, run this again and we're gonna run the copy right routine,
• 05:52 here we go it copies a values over the right field on those
• 05:55 it didn't print anything to me on window because I'd comment to these lines out

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.