As I mentioned at the end of Chapter 3, "Understanding Program Variables ," objects have their own data types. You can declare a variable as an object by using the following form of the Dim statement: Dim variableName As ObjectType | Object variables take up memory. For optimum code performance, you can reclaim the memory used by unneeded object variables by setting the variable equal to Nothing, like so: Set budgetSheet = Nothing | Here, ObjectType is the data type of the object you want to work with. For example, if you want to work with a Document object, you'd use a Dim statement similar to this: Dim currentDocument As Document It's a good idea to use object variables whenever you can because it enables you to use the Visual Basic Editor's handy IntelliSense features that I described in detail in Chapter 1 (see "Taking Advantage of IntelliSense"). After you've set up your object variable, you can assign an object to it by using the Set statement. Set has the following syntax: Set variableName = ObjectName variableName | The name of the variable. | ObjectName | The object you want to assign to the variable. | For example, the following statements declare a variable named budgetSheet to be a Worksheet object and then assign it to the 2004 Budget worksheet in the Budget.xls workbook: Dim budgetSheet As Worksheet Set budgetSheet = Workbooks("Budget.xls").Worksheets("2004 Budget") |