Rapid Application Development / Advanced Excel Development

VBA Best Practice

There is a lot of information floating around about how to get various things done in VBA, how to make the best use, or sometimes just the most use of VBA and Excel.
This section aims to add an element of Quality and Best Practices. These are just general guidelines, a professional developer will always assess the options and make the appropriate choice in their specific situation.
These suggestions are specific to Excel VBA in commercial settings, many will not translate to other technologies or other settings.

VBA Best Practice Series

High Quality Code - Classes

• Classes result from asking 'what am I modeling?' rather than 'what is this system to do?'
• Full class based design may be overkill for most VBA applications
• Hard/impossible to combine the best of spreadsheets with proper OO - data hiding is not possible.
• Classes may be useful when a set of routines share lots of data and it becomes cumbersome to pass around as parameters
• Or when you need to return a complex type from a routine