Is VBA slowing down your workbooks? Do you spend hours starting at Excel while the macros finish running? As part of our Speedy Spreadsheet Week, today lets talk about optimization techniques for Excel VBA & Macros.
Optimization Techniques for Excel VBA & Macros
Lets break this in to 2 sections. (1) Quick optimization techniques & tactics (2) Optimization ideas for the long run
Quick optimization techniques & tactics for VBA & Macros
1. Turn off the features you don’t want before running your macro
This is easy pick. Even while your macros are running, Excel does a lot of work to update the spreadsheet screen, re-calculate the formulas, display alerts etc. You can turn-off these things before running your macro and this would instantly speed up your code.
This is how you can do it:
Application.ScreenUpdating = false
Application.DisplayAlerts = false
and use these lines at the bottom of your code to turn on the alerts & screenupdating.
Application.ScreenUpdating = true
Application.DisplayAlerts = true
Things to remember:
- If your macro changes a part of the spreadsheet (for example animation, chart updation), turning off screenupdating is not the way to go.
- Set calculation mode to manual if it is ok (application.Calculation =xlCalculationManual)
- Make sure your turn-on everything at the end of your macro.
2. Do not select cells & objects
Range("A1").value = 10 is faster than
Range("A1").select
Selection.Value = 10
Many times, we select cells, objects in our code because the macro recorder produced such code. There is no need to select cell(s) to access or update the value(s).
3. Use built-in functions & features if possible
Do not re-invent the wheel. If there is a built-in formula or function, use it instead of developing your own. Objects like Application have many useful methods that can do what you want. For example, if you want to check if 2 ranges overlap, you an use Application.intersect instead of doing the math yourself.
4. Loop carefully
Some people say avoid loops. I say loop carefully. If you can do the same thing without a loop, do it. Else, make the loop as light-weight as possible. Think thru the problem and see what is the best way to loop. Use below guidelines when you are writing macros with loops:
- To search: Use built in methods like search, find, VLOOKUP, MATCH to find a value in a range instead of looping thru it.
- To copy: Use array to range copy method instead of looping thru the array and copying one element at a time. See example below:
Dim myArr(1 to 1000) as String
'do something and have a lot of values in myArr
'Copy all values in myArr to worksheet range myRange in one step!
Range("myRange").Value = Application.WorksheetFunction.Transpose(myArr) - To copy: If you want to copy one range of values to another, just assign the values to second range instead of looping. See below:
Range("r2").value = Range("r1").value - To sort: Use Range.sort method or any other built-in methods to sort if possible.
- Nesting loops: avoid them if you can. Else, take coffee breaks when you run the 14,000 times loop inside 17,345 times loop.
5. Use with block
When you want to do several operations on same object, use With block. This keeps your code clean, tells Excel to cache the object for a bunch of operations.
VBA & Macros – Optimization techniques for long run
Optimization is never ending process. So a good coder constantly learns techniques & follows sound principles to keep her code light-weight & fast.
1. Copy good ideas
There are tons of good code samples, example macro code on various sites, forums or books. Copy any good ideas you come across to speed up your code than trying to re-invent.
2. Divide and conquer
Sometimes a macro is slow because you are trying to do everything in one go. Try doing the task in small chunks. These ideas help:
- Break down your application in to smaller modules / macros.
- Show progress to end users thru a progress bar, frequent screen updates or status messages.
- Render most important aspects of the output first. Then do the rest in background.
3. Less is better
The less code you have, the lesser memory you use, the lesser objects, variables you deal with, the faster your code becomes. As an exercise, take your most complex macro and see if you can delete a line. Repeat this until there is nothing else you can remove. That alone improves the performance. Some ideas to consider:
- Plan your code before you write it. Think thru all steps.
- Do not write code for lame users (unless you are developing something to sell to larger public). Most users in workplace are smart and reasonable. So you can lessen error handling etc.
- Release objects you no longer want to clear memory.
- Negotiate with users and reduce features if possible.
4. Learn & Practice
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “optimize” as,
to make perfect … more
Learning & practicing is a proven path to perfection. You can learn by examining others code, reading books or helping others. Very soon, you see that your own code becomes better & faster.
5. Know when you cannot optimize
Optimization is like an itch. If you do not resist in time, it consumes you. For most of us running the code in shortest time is not the goal. Our goal is to meet end user needs & get things done. So as long as your code runs fast enough leave it in peace and move to next challenge.
Also, some times no matter what you do, your Excel macro takes time to run. May be its time you considered other languages / tools to solve the problem
More on Excel Optimization & Speeding up:
Read these articles too,
- Optimization & Speeding-up Tips for Excel Formulas
- Charting & Formatting Tips to Optimize & Speed up Excel
- Excel Optimization tips by Experts
- Excel Optimization tips submitted by our readers
How do you speed up your VBA Macros?
Personally, I try to stay away from VBA in my workbooks. But I find that with just a few lines of VBA, we can add a lot of wow factor, convenience to the spreadsheets. So, once in a while I add VBA to make my workbooks even more awesome. I also use VBA to clean up data, process it or generate reports. In such cases, by using above ideas I saved a lot of time & made my workbooks nimble.
What about you? How do you speed up your VBA & Macros? Please share using comments.
For more information on VBA & Macros
Check out our Excel VBA section or join our VBA Classes online program.
24 Responses to “10 Supercool UI Improvements in Excel 2010”
The best improvement by far is the Collapse Ribbon ^ button !
Kind of a shame that some of the best improvements are actually returns to old functionality. One thing I don't like is that to get to recent files I need to do an extra click after File - apart from Save As, that's why I'm usually in the File menu. I like the sparkline options, though they are still as not fully featured as some of the free and pay options out there.
The collapse button for the ribbon menu is good news. Can you make the ribbon menus stick too?
Nine improvements, not ten. You can also select multiple objects in 2007. Click on the Find & Select item at the far right of the Home tab, and the dropdown looks remarkably like your 2010 screenshot.
@Jon.. Thank you. Dumb me, I somehow thought we couldnt select objects in Excel 2007. Just saw the "select menu" and it is there. I have corrected the post and removed the point. I have added the "you can make your own ribbons" instead. Thanks once again.
@Arti: what do you mean by make ribbons stick?
@Alex: May be it is my installation, but when I go to "File menu" I see "recent files" by default.
For example, if I am working with one of the contextual ribbon menus (Pivot tables, Drawing/Chart etc), as soon as I click away from the selected object, the menu tabs vanish. If I click on the object again immediately, then Excel will remember what I was looking at, but if I wander away and click on a Pivot, then back again on the Chart, the menus will 'appear' but not get activated, thereby causing much annoyance and additional clicking.
I want to "pin" the whole menu (not invididual commands) somehow, so that I can have the menu there for the length of the time I am working with graphics. Excel 2003 used to have the Drawing toolbar you could detach and hover while you were working, but this functionality disappeared in Excel 2007.
My thought was Excel should just allow a 'pin', similar to the Recently Opened files menu, for the Ribbon Menus as well. If I have not selected any Drawing object, the commands can be greyed out, but I want the menu as a whole to 'stick'.
@Arti... I think MS solved this problem differently. When I select a pivot and go to "design" tab Excel 2010 remembers this and automatically takes me to "design" tab when I reselect the pivot.
Apart from this you can also define your own ribbon with all the things you normally do. See the above article (I have added this after Jon's comments)
Nice feature. About time for a upgrade for MS Office
Oh... okay. That might be a start. I'd probably just copy-paste the Drawing tab haha. Thanks. I'll definitely give Excel 2010 a try.
Btw - have you considered getting into / gotten into the world of Excel as it meets SharePoint?
Actually, the replacement new thing is probably better than all the rest. One thing that the designers of the Office 2007 ignored was allowing regular users to customize their own interface. Office 2010's interface was expanded in this way to address the huge uproar.
Is there still a limit on how many things you can add to the QAT bar? (I'm too lazy to look myself.)
@Jeff.. it seems to take quite a few, but only shows one line and gives a little arrow button at the end. (summary: shucks!)
The best thing is you can edit the ribbon directly from excel, so now i can create my own bar with just the things I use regularly!
One of the annoying things in 07 for me is the Add-Ins menu bar - in 03 I could keystroke directly to menu add ins.. In 07 I needed an extra keystroke just to activate the add-in menu, then the keystrokes as normal.. Hope this marek sense..
John -
If you remember the old Excel 2003 Alt-key shortcuts, you can still use them in 2007. To get to the Add-In dialog:
Alt-T-I
Dear Arti & Chandoo
Seen your comments over some issues. Hope you are form India, gone through your comment expecting a pin to command it as a whole, great, hope if someone out of MS have read it, it may be kept in mind while the next R & D of Office Ver. 16
Just incase someone forgot CTRL+F1 will collapse the ribbon.
[...] was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my [...]
I like the sparklines, and the ability to modify the charts
How do you get rid of the advertisment on the right hand side? If you upgrade then will it take off the ads?
Once again Microsoft has re-decorated the Office and we are NOT pleased!
The graphics object selector can be found in the Home ribbon under Find & Select, Select Objects near the bottom of the drop down. You can make it part of the Quick Access toolbar by right click over it and selecting Add to Quick Access toolbar.
The graphics "cursor" will now appear on the mini-toolbar at the top left of the window.
How to get rid of "Add-Ins" button in Backstage (File)" menu by means of XML code, i.e. to hide, to delete or to disable this button?
This button is usually situated in the Backstage menu between "Help" and "Options" buttons.
Vladimir, did you ever get an answer to your question?
I am tying to customize the ribbon UI for a file using XML, and this is precisely the piece I can't figure out. I can hide other tabs, remove items from QAT and backstage - all except the options that are showing up under add-ins in backstage. If there is an XML syntax for referencing this thing and making it invisible, I cannot find it.
Hey, nice tutorial. Please check my video tutorial on similar topic at the below link and provide your comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIFc0jYjpA