Chapter 19: Understanding Excel s Events

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Overview

In This Chapter

This chapter explains the concept of Excel events, and I include many examples that you can adapt to your own needs. As you will see, understanding events can give your Excel applications a powerful edge. Here, you will find:

• An overview of the types of events that Excel can monitor

• Essential background information for working with events

• Examples of Workbook events, Worksheet events, Chart events, and UserForm events

• Using Application events to monitor all open workbooks

• Examples of processing time-based events and keystroke 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. A simple 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.

Excel is capable of monitoring a wide variety of events and executing your VBA code when a particular event occurs. Following are just a few examples of the types of events that Excel recognizes:

• A workbook is opened or closed.

• A window is activated.

• A worksheet is activated or deactivated.

• Data is entered into a cell or the cell is edited.

• A workbook is about to be saved.

• A workbook is about to be printed.

• A worksheet is calculated.

• An object is clicked.

• The data in a chart is updated.

• A particular key or key combination is pressed.

• A particular time of day occurs.