This article is part of our VBA Crash Course. Please read the rest of the articles in this series by clicking below links.
- What is VBA & Writing your First VBA Macro in Excel
- Understanding Variables, Conditions & Loops in VBA
- Using Cells, Ranges & Other Objects in your Macros
- Putting it all together – Your First VBA Application using Excel
- My Top 10 Tips for Mastering VBA & Excel Macros
Introduction to Excel VBA
Everyone has a language. My mother tongue is Telugu. But I also speak Hindi, English and Cutish (that is the language my 2 year old kids speak). You may be fluent in English, Spanish, French, German or Vietnamese.
Just like you and I, Excel has a language too, the one it can speak and understand. This language is called as VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).
When you tell instructions to Excel in this VBA language, Excel can do what you tell it. Thus enabling you to program Excel so that you can automate a boring report, format a big&ugly chart, clean-up some messy data or just play some random noises.
What is a Macro then?
A macro is nothing but a set of instructions you give Excel in the VBA language.
Writing Your First Macro
Note: If you are new computer programming, watch our Introduction to Programming Video before proceeding.
In order to write your first VBA program (or Macro), you need to know the language first. This is where Excel’s tape recorder will help us.
Tape Recorder?!?
Yes. Excel has a built-in tape recorder, that listens and records everything you do, in Excel’s own language, ie VBA.
Since we dont know any VBA, we will use this recorder to record our actions and then we will see recorded instructions (called as code in computer lingo) to understand how VBA looks like.
Our First VBA Macro – MakeMeRed()
Now that you understand some VBA jargon, lets move on and write our very first VBA Macro. The objective is simple. When we run this macro, it is going to color the currently selected cell with Red. Why red? Oh, red is pretty, bright and awesome – just like you.
This is how our macro is going to work when it is done.
6 steps to writing your first macro
If you do not see Developer ribbon, follow these instructions.
Excel 2007:
1. Click on Office button (top left)
2. Go to Excel Options
3. Go to Popular
4. Check “Show Developer Tab in Ribbon” (3rd Check box)
5. Click ok.
Excel 2010:
1. Click on File Menu (top left)
2. Go to Options
3. Select “Customize Ribbon”
4. Make sure “Developer tab” is checked in right side area
5. Click ok.
Step 1: Select any cell & start macro recorder
This is the easiest part. Just select any cell and go to Developer Ribbon & click on Record Macro button.
Step 2: Give a name to your Macro
Specify a name for your macro. I called mine MakeMeRed. You can choose whatever you want. Just make sure there are no spaces or special characters in the name (except underscore)
Click OK when done.
Step 3: Fill the current cell with red color
This is easy as eating pie. Just go to Home ribbon and fill red color in the current cell.
Step 4: Stop Recording
Now that you have done the only step in our macro, its time to stop Excel’s tape recorder. Go to Developer ribbon and hit “stop recording” button.
Step 5: Assign your Macro to a button
Now go to Insert ribbon and draw a nice rectangle. Then, put some text like “click me to fill red” in it.
Then right click on the rectangle shape and go to Assign Macro. And select the MakeMeRed macro from the list shown. Click ok.
Step 6: Go ahead and play with your first macro
That is all. Now, we have linked the rectangle shape to your macro. Whenever you click it, Excel would drop a bucket of red paint in the selected cell(s).
Go ahead and play with this little macro of ours.
Understanding the MakeMeRed Macro Code
Now that your first macro is working, lets peek behind the scenes and understand what VBA instructions are required to fill a cell with red.
To do this, right click on your current sheet name (bottom left) and click on View code option. (You can also press ALT+F11 to do the same).
This opens Visual Basic Editor – a place where you can view & edit various VBA instructions (macros, code) to get things done in Excel.
Understanding the Visual Basic Editor:
Before understanding the MakeMeRed macro, we need to be familiar with VBE (Visual Basic Editor). See this drawing to understand it.
Viewing the VBA behind MakeMeRed
- Select Module 1 from left side area of VBE (called as Project Explorer).
- Double click on it to open it in Editor Area (top right, big white rectangle)
- You can see the VBA Code behind MakeMeRed
If you have followed the instructions above, your code should look like this:
Sub MakeMeRed()
'
' MakeMeRed Macro
'
With Selection.Interior
.Pattern = xlSolid
.PatternColorIndex = xlAutomatic
.Color = 192
.TintAndShade = 0
.PatternTintAndShade = 0
End With
End Sub
So much for a simple red paint!!!
Well, what can I say, Excel is rather verbose when it is recording.
Understanding the MakeMeRed VBA Code
Lets go thru the entire Macro code one line at a time.
- Sub MakeMeRed(): This line tells Excel that we are writing a new set of instructions. The word SUB indicates that the following lines of VBA are a sub-procedure (or sub-routine). Which in computer lingo means, a group of related instructions meant to be followed together to do something meaningful. The Sub-procedure ends when Excel sees the phrase “End Sub”
- Lines starting with a single quote (‘): These lines are comments. Excel will ignore anything you write after a single quote. These are meant for your understanding.
- With Selection.Interior: While filling a cell with Red color may seem like one step for you and I, it is in fact a lot of steps for your computer. And whenever you need to do a lot of operations on the same thing (in this case, selected cell), it is better to bunch all of them. This is where the WITH statement comes in to picture. When Excel sees With Seletion.Interior, Excel is going to think, “ok, I am going to do all the next operations on Selected Cell’s Interior until I see End With line“
- Lines starting with .: These are the lines that tell Excel to format the cell’s interior. In this case, the most important line is .Color = 192 which is telling Excel to fill Red color in the selected cell.
- End With: This marks the end of With block.
- End Sub: This marks the end of our little macro named MakeMeRed().
Few Tips to understand this macro better:
Once you are examining the macro code, here are a few ways to learn better.
- Change something: You can change almost any line of the macro to see what happens. For example, change .color = 192 to .color = 62 and save. Then come back to Excel and run your macro to see what happens.
- Delete something: You can remove some of the lines in the macro to see what happens. Remove the line .PatternColorIndex = xlAutomatic and run again to see what happens.
Download Example Workbook to learn VBA
Click here to download the example workbook with MakeMeRed Macro.
Excel 2003 Compatible Version here.
Play with the code & understand this better.
What Next – Understanding Variables, Conditions & Loops
In the part 2 of this tutorial, Learn about variables, conditions & loops – basic programming structures of VBA.
Do you write VBA Code? Share your experience?
Thanks to my college education & job experience. I am trained to be a programmer. So I find VBA quite intuitive and easy to use. But that may not be the case for many of you who latch on to VBA without any formal education.
I would like to know how you learn VBA and what experiences you had when you wrote that first macro. Please share using comments.
Join Our VBA Classes
We run an online VBA (Macros) Class to make you awesome. This class offers 20+ hours of video content on all aspects of VBA – right from basics to advanced stuff. You can watch the lessons anytime and learn at your own pace. Each lesson offers a download workbook with sample code. If you are interested to learn VBA and become a master in it, please consider joining this course.
38 Responses to “Time to showoff your VBA skills – Help me fix ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert snafu”
I tried your code with 2003, it works.
But, I know Addpicture does not take URLs anymore with 2007 onwards, perhaps its the same with picture.insert as well.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928983/en-us
The above link gives the solution as "picture fill in a shape such as a rectangle".
Tried to recreate this, but it worked fine for me. I just took the image of the error you showed in the post. Is there more info that can narrow this down a bit?
Don't know if this helps?
http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=47101
Hi
Not sure if this is what you're after, but I just tried this
Sub Macro1()
ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert("http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif").Select
End Sub
Tied a button to it on the sheet and it seems to work; hope this helps a little
Ian
@All.. the issue is in Excel 2007. In 2003 ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert seems to work fine. Unfortunately, I have design this in Excel 2007.. that is why I posted it here..
v2
Sub Macro1()
Set n = ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert("http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif")
With Range("c12")
t = .Top
l = .Left
End With
With n
.Top = t
.Left = l
End With
End Sub
Ian
That didn't come out very well. This positions at c12, so can change easily:
Sub Macro1()
Set n = ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert("http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif")
With Range("c12")
t = .Top
l = .Left
End With
With n
.Top = t
.Left = l
End With
End Sub
Works OK in 2007
Ian
The above codes work fines to my EXCEL 2007. Thanks.
Chandoo:
Try 'ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert'
With ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert("C:\Example.png")
.Left = ActiveSheet.Range("A1").Left
.Top = ActiveSheet.Range("A1").Top
End With
activesheet.pictures.insert "C:\Documents and Settings\Jon Peltier\Desktop\2007 stuff\insert_charts_2007.png"
Works for me in 2003 SP3 and in 2007 SP2.
Check the URL, and make sure you have internet connectivity.
What also works, and is newer (pictures.insert was supposedly deprecated in '97):
activesheet.shapes.addpicture "C:\Documents and Settings\Jon Peltier\Desktop\2007 stuff\insert_charts_2007.png", false, true, 200,200,100,100
Unfortunately you must specify dimensions (the last four arguments) and you don't necessarily know them. But the picture size is still related back to the original picture size, so you could use scaleheight and scalewidth to fix this.
Chandoo: I just re-read your post.
The code I posted works for me. However, I'm using a local picture. If you try to add a picture from the web, this won't work.
I remember solving this problem before by adding a rectangle shape first, then using the Shapes.AddPicture method to get a picture from the web.
I'll find that code and post it here.
Some more updates... The code "ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert (path)" works fine in Excel 2007 at home. Strange it failed miserably on my work laptop. Do you think this has got something to do with SP2 of MS Office 2007 or something like that?
@Ian, Jon: Thanks for the code snippets. I guess I will use my home installation of excel to do this.
Chandoo:
Try this on your work laptop:
Sub test()
ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddShape msoShapeRectangle, 50, 50, 100, 200
ActiveSheet.Shapes(1).Fill.UserPicture _
"http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/images/dpwithPig6.png"
End Sub
FYI:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928983/en-us
I didn't mean to post code with a local file, because both approaches worked with an internet image as well. This is in Excel 2007 SP2.
activesheet.pictures.insert "http://peltiertech.com/images/2009-07/col_area_noblanks.png"
Jon: Looks like I have SP1 on my client machine! I wasn't paying attention.
Just checked my home computer where I have SP2, and you're right...looks like they fixed it.
I didn't even bother testing in SP1, though I could if anyone cares enough.
I'm afraid I don't have a solution, but I find it remarkable that after attaining a certain status in the Excel world, Chandoo does not need to post on an Excel discussion forum to get help for an Excel problem. Instead, he posts on his blog and all the gurus come rushing to his help.
Isn't Web 2.0 great?
Teylyn - I saw Chandoo's tweet first, and followed the link back to his blog.
@Mike.. thank you. I have seen the fill rectangle solution before posting the query here. For that matter, I have also tried the solution of embedding a browser control on a spreadsheet. both of these seemed a bit extreme. That is why I have asked it here.
But I guess I will end up using it if I had to build this in work laptop.
@Teylyn: I have thought of posting this in a forum. (Unfortunately I have not been to any excel group in the last 5 years. Last time I was active was when I built a jave based excel sheet construction solution using POI.HSSF classes of Apache... ) After searching for a few hours, I found several forum posts where others had same problem and the solution recommended (using .left and .top parameters) is not working for me. Incidentally most of these solutions are from a certain Jon Peltier 😛
I thought may be the problem is interesting for fellow blog readers. So I posted it here.
Hi,
Adapting the code in the question,
[code]
Sub InsPicture()
pPath = "http://chandoo.org/images/pointy-haired-dilbert-excel-charts-tips.png"
With ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(pPath)
.Left = Range("a1").Left
.Top = Range("a1").Top
End With
End Sub
[/code]
Seems to work fine
Looks like it was a problem in 2007 up to SP1, which was corrected in SP2.
@Jon.. seems like the case. I just checked the version at work laptop. it is 12.0.6331.5000 (SP1).
Thank you so much every one. I really appreciate your time and suggestions in solving this.
Glad to help. I couldn't understand why something so straightforward wasn't working.
Hi All
Is there a way of inserting a motion clip eg animated gif or swf or flv?
Thks
You can insert animated GIFs by inserting them in a browser control through VBA. For other types of movies, I can guess you can insert them as clip art.
I WANT THE INSERT PICTURE BY USING COADING
so currently i was struggling same as you, chandoo, with the insert picture method in excel 2007/10 from an url and came along your thread here.
so i re-designed the code on the addshape method as mike was suggesting it and all of the sudden it works just fine.
thanks alot to you guys, you were a great help
a big salut from switzerland
Hi guys,
I need help copying and pasting an image with the path in a cell.
I leave the code.
And thank you very much!
Sub Copiarimg()
Dim pic As Picture
With ActiveSheet
Set pic = .Pictures.Insert(Range("f2").Value)
With .Range("e9:g22")
pic.Top = .Top
pic.Left = .Left
pic.Width = .Width
pic.Height = .Height
End With
End Sub
I've played around with the approaches in these comments, and the code below is what I've come up with. The ImagePath can be a local file or a URL. As Jon mentioned above, the trick is to set an arbitrary value for the width and height, then call the ScaleWidth and ScaleHeight methods afterward to reset the picture to its original size. Once the LockAspectRatio property is set, you can change the picture width and the height will automatically scale (or vice-versa).
Sub AddPictureToRange(TopLeftCellAddress As String, ImagePath As String)
Dim pic As Shape
Dim l As Single, t As Single
Dim temp As Single
l = Me.Range(TopLeftCellAddress).Left
t = Me.Range(TopLeftCellAddress).Top
temp = 10# ' arbitrary value
Set pic = Me.Shapes.AddPicture(ImagePath, msoFalse, msoTrue, l, t, temp, temp)
pic.ScaleHeight 1#, msoTrue
pic.ScaleWidth 1#, msoTrue
pic.LockAspectRatio = msoTrue
End Sub
I need some help with inserting pictures. I have an excel file with a column of item numbers next to this row I want to insert a picture of this item. The pictures are coded with the item number so I tried to insert it with one of the codes above:
Sub InsPicture()
pPath = "http://img.bricklink.com/P/80/55236.gif"
With ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(pPath)
End With
End Sub
That worked but I need to do that for every row separtly.
So I tried in the code
pPath = "http://img.bricklink.com/P/80/"&Text(a1;"#")&".gif"
But that gives errors.
Anybody ideas?
Hi Nicholas, I used your solution in a related problem in Excel 2003 and it worked flawlessly..thank you!
Hi Mike Alexander,
Your solution with some changes was helpful in my problem in XL 2007, thanks.
Hi,
thanks all. In addition, I had a problem with multiple pictures inserting (every new picture replaced the prior one). I've changed it a bit, may be helpful..
Sub test()
ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddShape msoShapeRectangle, 50 , 50, 100, 200
ActiveSheet.Shapes(1).Fill.UserPicture _
"http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/images/dpwithPig6.png"
ActiveSheet.Shapes(1).Copy
ActiveSheet.Paste
End Sub
Try this instead:
Sub test()
ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddShape msoShapeRectangle, 50 , 50, 100, 200
ActiveSheet.Shapes(ActiveSheet.Shapes.Count).Fill.UserPicture _
"http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/images/dpwithPig6.png"
End Sub
Thanks to everyone, this thread has been very helpful. However, image inserting still doesn't work quite as expect for me.
While I can get a picture inserted into an Excel 2010 worksheet using either:
1) ActiveSheet.Shapes(ActiveSheet.Shapes.Count).Fill.UserPicture...
2) ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(pPath), and
3) Shapes.AddPicture...
unfortunately the images all insert with a display size determined not by the actual pixel dimensions of the image but by the dpi resolution.
So for example, if I insert two copies of the exact same 600x600 pixel image, one with a 300dpi resolution and the other with 72dpi, they display at vastly different sizes on screen.
While this might be intended behaviour for Excel in order to maintain a WSYWIG printing layout, I actually need a way to insert the image based on the the actual pixel dimesnsions and ignoring the dpi resolution.
Any help appreciated.
Thanks
Kez
Not doing an intentional bump, but realised I posted in rely to one of the repsonses here instead of to the main thread, so reposting.
=====
Thanks to everyone, this thread has been very helpful. However, image inserting still doesn’t work quite as expected for me.
While I can get a picture inserted into an Excel 2010 worksheet using any of the below methods:
1) ActiveSheet.Shapes(ActiveSheet.Shapes.Count).Fill.UserPicture....
2) ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(pPath), and
3) Shapes.AddPicture....
unfortunately the images all insert with a display size determined not by the actual pixel dimensions of the image but by the dpi resolution.
So for example, if I insert two copies of the exact same 600×600 pixel image, one with a 300dpi resolution and the other with 72dpi, they display at vastly different sizes in Excel on screen.
While this might be intended behaviour for Excel in order to maintain a WYSIWYG printing layout, I actually need a way to insert the images based on the the actual pixel dimesnsions and ignoring the dpi resolution.
Any help appreciated.
Thanks
Kez
Well, answered my own question 🙂
For those who might be interested, you can use this function:
Public Function GetPicDims(strFilePath As String, strFileName As String) As String
GetPicDims = CreateObject("Shell.Application").Namespace((strFilePath)). _
ParseName(strFileName).ExtendedProperty("Dimensions")
End Function
to get the dimensions of the image you want to insert. Then you can parse the return string and use the width and height values to add a rectangle shape of the appropraite size, like:
ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddShape msoShapeRectangle 50, 50, iWidth, iHeight
which you then fill with the picture:
ActiveSheet.Shapes(ActiveSheet.Shapes.Count).Fill.UserPicture "c:\temp\test.jpg"
This way the picture gets inserted using the pixel dimensions and the (print) resolution gets ignored.
If desired, the GetPicDims function can be made more generic to get other ExtendedProperties.
Regards
Kez