is it possible to drop rows or columns in an excel vba array

Question

When you create an array from a selection in excel it ignores the fact that some rows are hidden.

For example if you have data in columns A, B, and C and column B is hidden, the array still has 3 columns and 4 rows.

Is there a way to either

1. Drop columns or rows from the array once it's created or... Ie drop column B
2. tell the array to consider only the non hidden columns when it;s being formed (so it would only consider column A, C.

Some code to illustrate what I want dim v as variant Range("A2:C4").Select v = selection

the selection is now 3 columns wide by 4 rows deep. I just want the two columns in the selection which are not hidden.

The only two ways I can think of to do that are (1) drop something from the original selection (2) not select the hidden columns in the first place.

maybe I can select a non-contiguous range and then turn that into an array?

Answer 1

You can accomplish this by

• create a temporary worksheeet
• copy the "visible" cells to the temporary sheet
• read the cells into a vba array
• delete the temporary sheet.

Assume on Sheet2 you have data in A1:C4 with column B hidden.

The following code will result in V being a 2D array (1 to 4, 1 to 2) containing the data from only columns A and C.

Option Explicit
Sub arrUnHidden()
    Dim R As Range
    Dim V As Variant
    Dim wsTemp As Worksheet
    Set R = Worksheets("Sheet2").Range("A1", Cells(Rows.Count, "C").End(xlUp))

Worksheets.Add
    ActiveSheet.Name = "Temp"
    Set wsTemp = Worksheets("Temp")
    R.SpecialCells(xlCellTypeVisible).Copy wsTemp.Cells(1, 1)
    V = wsTemp.UsedRange

Application.DisplayAlerts = False 'suppress message when deleting a sheet
    Worksheets("temp").Delete
Application.DisplayAlerts = True

End Sub

Answer 2

Several points:

0: Do you mean actual arrays or do you mean named ranges? Visual Basic has arrays, excel has ranges. For the purposes of this answer, I will assume that you mean named ranges, as you cannot delete items from array without resizing the array.

1: There are ways to delete rows and columns from excel, or move ranges to not include certain elements. They are too numerous to mention here, but ThisRange.Columns(1).Delete or .Offset are both options.

2: Instead of changing what the range contains, I would use a for each loop that takes into account the cell properties.

As the comment suggested, more information would enable a greator tailoring of this answer.