Excel VBA: Answer gets "stuck"

Question

I'm new to VBA in Excel 2003. I've written a UDF that takes in two strings: one filter and one that will be a cell reference. When I am debugging and call the function a couple times in a row in the VBA editor, everything works as I expect. But when I use the UDF multiple times in a spreadsheet, all uses show the exact same answer, despite there being different input.

The function is below. It updates a pivot table and then copies the value out of a cell. But I must be misusing it:

Function UpdatePivotAndFetchCell(catcode As String, theCell As String) As Variant
Dim ws, pt, catField, pi, theval, finalVal
Set ws = Worksheets("Reporting")
Set pt = ws.PivotTables("MyReport")
pt.RefreshTable
Set catField = pt.PivotFields("Category")

For Each pi In catField.PivotItems
    If InStr(pi.Value, catcode) Then
        pt.PivotFields("Category").CurrentPage = pi.Value
        theval = ws.Range(theCell).Value
        On Error Resume Next
        If (TypeName(theval) <> "Error") Then
            finalVal = theval
        End If
        Exit For
    End If
Next pi
UpdatePivotAndFetchCell = finalVal
End Function

If I run it with the VBA editor, I get:

Debug.Print (UpdatePivotAndFetchCell("C001", "K284"))
    'Returns 0.48
Debug.Print (UpdatePivotAndFetchCell("C002", "K284"))
    'Returns 0.52

But within a worksheet:

=UpdatePivotAndFetchCell("C001", "K284")
    (displays 0.52)
=UpdatePivotAndFetchCell("C002", "K284")
    (displays 0.52)

Am I not specifying the function properly, maybe? It's a mystery to me.

Answer 1

Functions called from a worksheet are not allowed to change sheets . Otherwise you could easily create infinite loops in the calculation tree. So everything that changes the sheet is ignored (such as RefreshTable() or .CurrentPage = ) and causes the function to stop.

For completeness sake, there is a workaround , but you should not use it, and you may run into problems if you do.