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 - Modules

• As solution complexity increases think in terms of modules rather than procedures
• Use enums to add understanding
• Could use types but probably better to go straight to classes.
• Module name should explain what it does, a comment at the top may be useful.
• May need 1 or 2 global variables, but may need lots of module level variables
• A module should represent a bunch of closely related things eg: use common data
• Use Option private module otherwise public routines will be listed in the user defined functions list.
• Forms should usually call straight out to a class or module to do the real work.