Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook

Manage Web Queries

Most of the preceding samples get an existing QueryTable, modify its properties, and then call Refresh. I could have used the QueryTables collection’s Add method to create these queries on the fly. However, I would need to remember to delete previously created QueryTables.

Getting rid of unneeded query tables on a worksheet can seem like an unimportant housekeeping chore, but it is very important to avoid having redundant or unneeded queries running in the background. Background queries degrade performance, spontaneously connect to the Internet, and can generate asynchronous errors, as mentioned earlier. This can really confuse users!

How to do it

The following code creates three new query tables on the active worksheet:

   Dim ws As Worksheet, qt As QueryTable, i As Integer
   Set ws = ActiveSheet
   For i = 1 To 3
       Set qt = ws.QueryTables.Add("URL;http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ecn? _ & 
       s=yhoo", [A12])
       qt.Name = "Temp Query"
       qt.WebTables = "22"
       qt.WebSelectionType = xlSpecifiedTables
       qt.WebFormatting = xlWebFormattingNone
       qt.BackgroundQuery = False
       qt.RefreshStyle = xlOverwriteCells
       qt.Refresh
   Next

When this code runs it creates three query tables on the worksheet named Temp_Query, Temp_Query_1, and Temp_Query_2 respectively. There’s no easy way to manage query tables through the Excel user interface, however, if you press Ctrl+G you’ll see the names for the new query tables listed in the Go To dialog box (Figure 4-8).

Figure 4-8. Excel automatically numbers query ...