Chapter 19: Animation

Overview

Believe it or not, it is possible to animate objects in Excel. If taken to extreme, you could write a complete arcade game in Excel ‚ all the tools to do this are there. Serious users of Excel would probably not be very impressed to find Space Invaders appearing in their Profit and Loss Account spreadsheet, but it can be done. However, for the purposes of this book, we will simply move an image object about while changing its color randomly .

First of all, you need to draw an image control onto the spreadsheet. You do this by selecting View Toolbars Control Toolbox to open the Toolbox window. Select the Image control by clicking the control in the toolbox; then drag it onto your spreadsheet. It should have the name Image1. If you cannot identify the Image control in the toolbox, hold your mouse pointer over each icon in turn until you see the tooltip box that says Image.

Select a control button and drag it onto the spreadsheet. Change the Caption property in the Properties window for the control button to read My Animation so that this appears on the button face. Your spreadsheet should look like Figure 19-1.

Figure 19-1: Setting up an animation object and a control button

Double-click the command button to go into the code procedure for the command button Click event. Add the following code:

 Private Sub CommandButton1_Click() 
 again: 
 With VBAProject.Sheet1.Image1 
 Randomize 
 .BackColor = QBColor(Int((Rnd * 15) + 1)) 
 .Top = .Top + 2 
 .Left = .Left + 2 
 If .Top > 100 Then .Top = 1 
 If .Left > 100 Then .Left = 1 
 End With 
 GoTo again 
 End Sub 

Note that the first line sets up a label called again . This sets up a loop based on the label so that the routine is continuously executed. A With statement is used for the object VBAProject .Sheet1.Image1 so that it does not have to be coded each time you want to access the image.

The Randomize statement sets the seed to create random numbers . A random number is a number chosen without any preset pattern, such as a number coming up in a lottery or on a roulette table. If you do not use Randomize , you will keep getting the same sequence of random numbers.

The back color of the image box is then set to a random color using Quick Basic colors ‚ this dates back to the old version of Quick Basic when only 16 colors onscreen were possible. It is still useful when you want to change the color using simple random numbers instead of providing a full 24-bit number for 16.3 million colors. The function Rnd creates random numbers between 0 and 1. This is multiplied by 15 to give the full range of colors and set them to integers. Because integer (INT) effectively rounds everything downward by dropping the decimal point, 1 is then added. This command will make the image control display random colors as it moves across the screen.

The Top property is then increased by two to make the object move down the screen. The Left property is increased by two to make the object move across the screen. If the object reaches a limit of 100 in either direction, it resets back to 1 and the process starts again, moving diagonally to the right. The With block ends, and the program loops back around to again .

Make sure that you click the Design Mode icon in the top-left hand corner of the Toolbox window to take the command button out of design mode and make it live. Run this code by clicking the My Animation button on the spreadsheet, and you will see the image control move right and downward, randomly changing color at the same time. Press Ctrl-Break to stop the code.

Simple animation can also be provided by changing the background color of a cell :

 Sub cell_animation() 
 again1: 
 Dim w As Worksheet 
 Set w = Worksheets("sheet1") 
 Randomize 
 For n = 65 To 69 
 For m = 1 To 5 
 
 w.Range(Chr(n) & m).Rows.Interior.Color = QBColor(Int((Rnd * 15) + 1)) 
 DoEvents 
 
 Next m 
 
 Next n 
 GoTo again1 
 End Sub 

This code loops around continuously to a label called again1 . You cannot use the same label as in the previous example if this procedure is placed in the same module.

The first object, w , is created as a worksheet and set to point to sheet1. Next, Randomize sets the seed for the random number generator as before.

Two nested For..Next loops are created. The n For..Next loop goes from 65 to 69 ‚ these are the ASCII values of A to E, and they represent columns . Because you want to increment the letter through the VBA code, you need to use the actual numeric value instead of the character itself. The m For..Next loop goes from 1 to 5 to represent rows. By changing the n value to a character and concatenating it with the changing m value, you can get cell addresses for all 25 cells within the loop structure (a five-by-five matrix of cells ). A DoEvents statement is added to ensure that the previous command takes place before the code moves onto the next line. DoEvents was used in Chapter 17 in the example for reading the keyboard.

The cell interior (background) color is set to a random number between 1 and 16 ‚ these are the old Quick Basic colors as used in the previous example. Finally, the code loops back to again1 and resets the background colors again.

If you run this code and click on the spreadsheet, you will see that the cells in the top-left of the spreadsheet constantly change color. Press Ctrl-Break to stop the code.