Find Method Help in VBA

[TC]

Hey All,

I need to use the 'Find' method and the documentation doesn't answer a
number of questions:

-- With the 'LookAt' option, xlWhole or xlPart, whole or part of what?

-- Regarding 'What', when it says a Microsoft Excel data type, does that
mean integer, long, boolean, etc.?

-- For 'SearchFormat', what are the options for this and what do they mean?

-- When using 'MatchByte', how does one determine if double-byte support is
installed and does it matter if the flag is set (i.e. does it throw an
error) if double-byte is support is not installed?

expression.Find(What, After, LookIn, LookAt, SearchOrder, SearchDirection,
MatchCase, MatchByte, SearchFormat)

expression Required. An expression that returns a Range object.

What Required Variant. The data to search for. Can be a string or any
Microsoft Excel data type.

After Optional Variant. The cell after which you want the search to begin.
This corresponds to the position of the active cell when a search is done
from the user interface. Note that After must be a single cell in the range.
Remember that the search begins after this cell; the specified cell isn't
searched until the method wraps back around to this cell. If you don't
specify this argument, the search starts after the cell in the upper-left
corner of the range.

LookIn Optional Variant. The type of information.

LookAt Optional Variant. Can be one of the following XlLookAt constants:
xlWhole or xlPart.

SearchOrder Optional Variant. Can be one of the following XlSearchOrder
constants: xlByRows or xlByColumns.

SearchDirection Optional XlSearchDirection. The search direction.

XlSearchDirection can be one of these XlSearchDirection constants.
xlNext default
xlPrevious

MatchCase Optional Variant. True to make the search case sensitive. The
default value is False.

MatchByte Optional Variant. Used only if you've selected or installed
double-byte language support. True to have double-byte characters match only
double-byte characters. False to have double-byte characters match their
single-byte equivalents.

SearchFormat Optional Variant. The search format.

 

[Jim Thomlinson]

LookAt - Do you want an exact match or do you want partial matches. For
example in the range you are searching you have a value of Mary-Sue. If you
go searching for the value Sue using XLPart it will find Mary-Sue as there is
a pratial match. If you were using XLWhole it requires to match the entire
string.

What - What is a variant meaning that it can take a string or an integer or
a double or a ???. It depends on what you are looking for allowing you to
search for any type of data.

You don't need to worry too much about MatchByte. As it is optional I
recommend that you just exclude it. No it should not cause you errors.

SearchFormat - True or false depending on whether you want to search for a
format such as underlines and such. You need to specify the format with code
like this...

Application.FindFormat.Borders(xledgebottom).weight = xlThick

Find returns a range object. That means taht it returns a cell. If no
matching cell is found then it returns Nothing. Nothing being a range object
that is not set to any cell.

Things to note are that you want to specify all of the arguments that are
necessary to ensure that it works correctly. Since end users can change the
find parameters you can not just leave things to the values that find
currently is using. So for example match case is one that you want to specify
as you can not guarntee if it is checked or not prior to executing the find.
Seach direction on the other hand you may not care about so you can just omit
that one...

 

[Dave Peterson]

#1. LookAt:=xlwhole means that the thing you're looking for must match the
value in the cell (exactly).

So if the cell contained "TC Wrote", then looking for TC (and xlwhole) would
mean that this cell wouldn't be a match.

lookat:=xlpart means that you don't have to match the whole cell (but you can).
Looking for TC (and xlpart) would find it in "TC Wrote", "this is what TC
wrote", or even exactly "TC".

(This is not the the same thing as MSWord's "Find Whole Words Only"--excel
doesn't have this kind of thing.)

#2. Yep. But it has to be something that resolves to a simple value--No
objects (object.value and object.text are ok), no arrays (an element of the
array could be ok, though.)

#3. Do an Edit|Find in excel. Click on the Options button if you can't see the
options. You'll see you can specify the format of what you want to find. If
you record a macro when you do it manually, you'll see what the code looks like.

#4. I don't have doublebyte stuff is installed. I think that stuff is for
unicode characters--like some languages (Chinese???)--but that's a guess.

===========
Ps. One thing to remember is that these settings are shared between your code
and the user. So it's always a good idea to specify what you want -- else you
may be inheriting the settings from the previous find (by the user or by someone
else's code!).

 

[TC]

Thanks guys!