切换单元宏-奇怪的行为

Question

I have created a macro for the purpose of switching the contents between two cells. Although it works, I think it could be written in some more elegant way.

Consider the folowing example:

Supose that in the previous picture you select the first two cells ("Jack" and "The"). After you run the macro, the contents of the selected cells are switched.

The working code is this:

Sub SwitchCells()

    Dim R As Range
    Set R = Range(Selection.Address)

    Dim Temp As String

    If R.Count = 2 Then
        Temp = R(1).Value
        R(1) = R(2)
        R(2) = Temp
    End If

End Sub

Although is works, I would like that the temporary variable would be also an Range Object (and not a String like in the previous example), so that the macro would just switch places between objects. I would like to do something like this

Sub SwitchCells()

    Dim R As Range
    Set R = Range(Selection.Address)

    Dim Temp As Range

    If R.Count = 2 Then
        Set Temp = R(1)
        R(1) = R(2)
        R(2) = Temp
    End If

End Sub

The problem in this second version of the macro is that when R(1) gets the value of R(2) , so does the temporary variable Temp

It seems that Temp is not a variable but a pointer to the address of the variable.

I don't quite understand exaclty why is this happening. Can you please explain or point out some direction for the reason of this behaviour?

Thank you for your time.

Eduardo.

Answer 1

Range is an object type. A variable like Temp in the 2nd version of your macro will hold a reference to the object you have set it to - R(1) in this case. It does not create a new copy of that object so any changes to R(1) will be reflected in Temp .

The normal way to work around this would be to create a new object and copy the relevant values over to it. Unfortunately Range objects cannot be directly created and only exist as part of a Worksheet object:

Dim r As Range
' This line won't compile because we can't create a new Range
Set r = New Range
' This line will trigger a runtime error
Set r = CreateObject("Excel.Range")

For the specific case of two cells which are in the same column and adjacent to each other, there is a straightforward workaround:

R(2).Cut
R(1).Insert Shift:=xlDown