Excel® 2010 Power Programming with VBA

Chapter 19: Understanding Excel's Events

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Recognizing the types of events that Excel can monitor

• Figuring out what you need to know to work with events

• Exploring examples of Workbook events, Worksheet events, Chart events, and UserForm events

• Using Application events to monitor all open workbooks

• Seeing examples of processing time-based events and keystroke events

What You Should Know about Events

In several earlier chapters in this book, I present examples of VBA event-handler procedures, which are specially named procedures that are executed when a specific event occurs. An example is the CommandButton1_Click procedure that is executed when the user clicks an object named CommandButton1 stored on a UserForm or on a worksheet. Clicking the button is an event that triggers the execution of the event-handler VBA code.

Excel is programmed to monitor many different events that occur. These events can be classified as the following:

• Workbook events: Events that occur for a particular workbook. Examples of such events include Open (the workbook is opened or created), BeforeSave (the workbook is about to be saved), and NewSheet (a new sheet is added).

• Worksheet events: Events that occur for a particular worksheet. Examples include Change (a cell on the sheet is changed), SelectionChange (the user moves the cell indicator), and Calculate (the worksheet is recalculated).

• Chart events: Events that occur for a particular chart. These events include Select ...