How to loop through all columns using VBA in Excel

Question

Based on a tutorial I've created a little contact manager in Excel and made some adjustments for my own purpose. So far so good and a nice little experience for me as a VBA-noob:)

A bit of background information

I've got two sheets. The first one contains people and their address. The second contains all their contactdetails (to prevent having infinite columns on the first sheet for different phones, mails etc). The details are matched based upon the ID of the data in the first sheet and presented in two listboxes. The search value is stored in C5. C4 references to the column for a specific type of data (like Name, Address, Place) and is empty when I want to search all columns.

The issue

When I try to search for something it only returns the first item found and stops. I guess I need to create a loop to get all items but so far I've not succeeded in creating a functioning loop.

Code I have so far

Private Sub btnZoeken_Click()
'dim the variables
Dim Crit As Range
Dim FindMe As Range
Dim DataSH As Worksheet

On Error GoTo errHandler:

Set DataSH = Sheet1

Application.ScreenUpdating = False

'Default search criteria is Alles (all columns).
If Me.cboHeader.Value <> "Alles" Then
        If Me.txtZoeken = "" Then
        DataSH.Range("C5") = ""
        Else
        DataSH.Range("C5") = "*" & Me.txtZoeken.Value & "*"
        End If
End If

'if all columns is selected
If Me.cboHeader.Value = "Alles" Then
'find the value in the column
    Set FindMe = DataSH.Range("B9:H30000").Find(What:=txtZoeken, LookIn:=xlValues, _
    LookAt:=xlPart, SearchOrder:=xlByRows, SearchDirection:=xlNext, _
    MatchCase:=False, SearchFormat:=False)
'variable for criteria header
    Set Crit = DataSH.Cells(8, FindMe.Column)
'if no criteria is added to the search
        If Me.txtZoeken = "" Then
        DataSH.Range("C5") = ""
        DataSH.Range("C4") = ""
        Else
        'add values from the search
        DataSH.Range("C4") = Crit
            If Crit = "ID" Then
            DataSH.Range("C5") = Me.txtZoeken.Value
            Else
            DataSH.Range("C5") = "*" & Me.txtZoeken.Value & "*"
            End If
        End If
End If


'filter the data
DataSH.Range("B8").CurrentRegion.AdvancedFilter Action:=xlFilterCopy, _
CriteriaRange:=Range("Data!$C$4:$C$5"), CopyToRange:=Range("Data!$N$8:$T$8"), _
Unique:=False
'add the dynamic data to the listbox
lstResult.RowSource = DataSH.Range("outdata").Address(external:=True)

'show which column contained to selected value (for now only for debugging)
Me.RegTreffer.Value = DataSH.Range("C4")

'error handler
On Error GoTo 0
Exit Sub
errHandler:
'if error occurs then show me exactly where the error occurs
MsgBox "No result for " & txtZoeken.Text & " in " & Me.cboHeader.Value
'clear the listbox if no match is found
Me.lstResult.RowSource = ""
Exit Sub
End Sub

How should I build a loop to get all the rows with a matching value in any column? And do I need to create two different loops? One for searching in all columns and one for searching specific columns or wouldn't it matter?

Answer 1

First, a direct answer to your question:

Private Sub LookForMatches()

    ' Set a reference to our range
    Dim MyRange As Range
    Set MyRange = ThisWorkbook.Sheets("Sheet1").Range("A1:C4")
    
    ' Loop through all of the cells in the range
    Dim Cell As Variant
    For Each Cell In MyRange.Cells
    
        ' In this example, we will check if the cell equals 1
        ' If it does, display a message informing the user of the match and the location of the cell
        If Cell.Value = 1 Then
            MsgBox "Match found.  The cell " & Cell.Address & " equals 1."
        End If
    
    Next Cell
    
End Sub

Here is the data on Sheet1 used for my example.

Hopefully this template is enough of an example on how to loop through a range and look for information. If you are only interested in the row of the cell and not the full address you can use the Cell.Row method instead of the Cell.Address method.

Second, you typically shouldn't loop through data like this. It's much slower than other methods. For example, we could store this range in an array, and then work with the array rather than the range. But that's all outside the scope of your question. I hope this was helpful!