This article is the third in a series on integrating the programming power of AutoCAD VBA with the functionality found

in other Windows applications specifically, Microsoft Excel. In the first segment we discussed what was possible, in the second segment we discussed how to establish a basic link with Excel through AutoCAD VBA to open an Excel session and close it down, and in this session we discuss how to port formatted data from AutoCAD VBA to Excel worksheets. Objects of Our Desire Now that you know how to make an AutoCAD VBA routine speak "Excel-ese," and how to launch a session of Excel, let's examine the Workbook and the Worksheet objects in Excel. You can study the properties of these and other Excel objects through the AutoCAD VBA IDE (integrated development environment) by: 1. Running the IDE (use the VBAIDE command). 2. Using the Tools/References pulldown menu option to activate a Microsoft Excel Object Library reference by placing a check next to this entry in the References listbox. 3. Using the Object Browser tool (use the F2 function key in the VBA IDE or use the View/Object Browser pull-down menu option) with the primary Combobox set to Excel (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Object Browser.

View Larger Figure 2: Create a UserForm as shown. The Object Browser reports the properties, classes, and variable types associated with objects. For example, if you select a Worksheet class, it has a Cells property as a Range class. If you select the Range class, it has a Value property, which holds a variant value. Let's use this information to pump different types of values (integers, real numbers, and text) into cells in an opened spreadsheet. 1. Use the process outlined in the last tutorial to create a UserForm as shown in Figure 2. 2. Add a Microsoft Excel Object Library reference to the form. 3. Stretch the UserForm and CommandButtons so that they can accommodate the button text. 4. Apply the following code to the top button, CommandButton1, and bottom button, CommandButton3:

We added an End command to the code for CommandButton3 so that when this button is clicked, not only is the current spreadsheet closed, but the VBA routine is also exited, thus returning us to the VBA IDE. You can run the routine at this point, but remember, once the Excel spreadsheet appears on your screen, you must toggle back to your AutoCAD session (use ALT+TAB to move back and forth between the current Excel session and AutoCAD software) to see your UserForm. Let's examine the code for CommandButton2. Going Out for the Pass The code for this CommandButton assumes that Excel is already running. Three variables are established to hold an integer, a real number, and a text value. These values are passed to the Excel Worksheet object cell-value property using (row,column) format and notation. 1. Apply the following code to CommandButton2:

2. Run the application now. 3. Click on the top button to open a spreadsheet. 4. Click on the middle button to fill the first column with values. 5. Click the third button to shut down the application and the spreadsheet. Note: Excel will not completely close down until after you've told it not to save the spreadsheet. Excel VBA IDE AutoCAD software isn't the only application with a VBA IDE. Microsoft Excel also has a VBA IDE, which you can access from the Excel main menu by selecting Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor (see Figure 3).

View Larger Figure 3: Accessing the Excel VBA IDE. What if you want to close down the Excel spreadsheet without having to click a DisplayAlert dialog box that asks you if you want to save the workbook? Go to the Excel VBA IDE Help facility to find this information (DisplayAlert property of an Application object). 1. Replace the code for CommandButton3 with the following code, which completely closes Excel without first calling a DisplayAlert prompt:

2. Run the application again, clicking on the top button and then the middle button. Did you notice that the value 1.5 was not reported properly in cell 2,1? This is because each cell has default formatting, and we have not instructed Excel to change its formatting once data has been passed to its cells. With the Format function you can set the formatting for any cell by passing formatted values to the cell. 3. Quit the application. 4. Replace the code for CommandButton2 with the following code:

5. Restart the application. 6. Use the top and middle buttons to send the new values to the spreadsheet. 7. Remember to stretch the column width of the first column to accommodate the values passed to it. The resulting values passed to the spreadsheet should look like those shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: The values are passed to the spreadsheet. Keeping Up Appearances In addition to cell value formatting, you can also control cell sizing, boldfacing, italicizing, and column widths. 1. Replace the code in CommandButton2 with the following code:

2. Run the application again to see how to control the appearance of values.

Home on the Range Sometimes you will want to pass a value to many cells or to pass a function to a cell for a spreadsheet calculation. So let's end this segment by examining the code that accomplishes this.

2. Run the application again to see the effect. Not much needs to be said here. The code uses the Range class of the object with a cell range format value and the Formula property of the Range class to assign a formula to a cell. The value of 4 is passed to four cells, and the average, sum, and a subtraction of values is calculated in adjacent cells. Next time, we'll discuss pulling values from an Excel spreadsheet into AutoCAD VBA objects such as ListBoxes and ComboBoxes, and we'll also get our first look at code to survey counts of objects within an AutoCAD drawing and report them in a spreadsheet.

VBA: Integrating with Microsoft Excel - Part 2

By dave espinosa-aguilar This article is the second in a series on integrating the programming power of AutoCAD VBA with the functionality found in other Windows applications specifically, Microsoft Excel. In the first article, we discussed what is possible; now it's time to examine how it's possible. And that begins with a quick overview of the AutoCAD VBA Integrated Development Environment (or IDE). The IDE At the command prompt, enter the command VBAIDE. This initializes the IDE in a separate window. You can use the ALT+TAB keys to switch back and forth between the IDE and your AutoCAD session. If you close AutoCAD, the IDE window closes with it. The IDE is used to develop and debug your program code and your dialogs

and to view the information your program is processing (see Figure 1). Once you have finished using the IDE (usually after saving your programming work), you can close the IDE window without closing AutoCAD.

View Larger Figure 1: The IDE enables you to simultaneously view your application user forms, code, the object browser, the toolbox, object properties, references and more. The VBA Manager You can also bring up the IDE through the use of the VBAMAN command. Unlike VBAIDE, the VBAMAN command enables you to load (and unload) existing VBA project files to/from memory before jumping to the IDE to develop or modify them. You can work with several project files open at once. When you use the VBAMAN command, the VBA Manager dialog box opens. The Visual Basic Editor button in this dialog box takes you to the IDE (see Figure 2). The VBA Manager is also where you create new project files, develop macros to run your project files, or embed your programs in any of your open drawings.

Figure 2: The VBA Manager Dialog loads, unloads, and exports application code. Our First User Program Rather than try to explain every button and function in these interfaces, we're going to go straight to developing our very first program. It's objective is simple enough: open and close Excel. Make sure you have Excel already installed on your system, and then follow along as we begin to develop our first application:

1. Start by making sure you're in a brand new AutoCAD session. 2. Use the VBAMAN command to bring up the VBA Manager dialog box. 3. Click the New button. This creates a new project with a default project name (ACADProject) 4. Click the Visual Basic Editor button to go to the IDE. 5. Enter Control+R or select Project Explorer from the View pull-down menu to view the Project Explorer. It may be docked to one side of your window or it may be a floating window. In either case, it should be reporting your ACADproject. 6. If the project name displays a + (plus) sign to the left, click on the plus sign to see subitem ThisDrawing (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: The project window reports projects loaded, and UserForms included in a project.

View Larger Figure 4: A UserForm is created for the application. The Project window and Toolbox are organized for easy object placement. 7. From the Insert pull-down menu, select UserForm pull-down to insert a UserForm into this project. Stretch the UserForm dialog box and the window the UserForm sits in so that they take up approximately the space shown in Figure 4. 8. From the View pull-down menu select Toolbox, which opens the Toolbox dialog box. You can also stretch the Toolbox dialog box. Setting Up an Excel Reference Once you've added the UserForm to the project, the next step is telling AutoCAD software how to speak Excel-ese. References expand AutoCAD VBA to include new

tools and capabilities, and for this application we need to be able to speak in terms of worksheets, cells, ranges, and other concepts associated with spreadsheets. Here's how we do it: 1. From the Tools pull-down menu, select References, which brings up the References dialog box. 2. Several references at the top of the Available References list may already be selected. Leave them as they are, and search down through the list of available references until you see one that looks like Microsoft Excel 9.0 Object Library (this assumes Microsoft Excel 2000 is already installed). Select the box to the left of the Library as shown in Figure 5. When you do this, the Location label at the bottom of the dialog box should report a path similar to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\EXCEL9.OLB.

Figure 5: Adding the Microsoft Excel 9.0 Object Library reference enables your application to speak "Excel-ese." 3. Click the OK button, which returns you to the IDE. That's all it takes to expand our application to speak in Excel terms. Adding Buttons to the UserForm Now that you've told the application how to speak Excel-ese, let's create some buttons on our UserForm dialog box that launch Excel, close Excel, and Quit out of our application. Here we go: 1. Move your cursor over the various objects in the Toolbox dialog box and pay close attention to the tooltips. Find the tool with tooltip CommandButton and click it. Your cursor changes to CommandButton draw mode.

View Larger Figure 6: You can re-organize the look and layout of your application and development interfaces at any time. 2. Move your cursor over the UserForm and pick an upper-left point. This will spot a button on the UserForm. Click and drag on the button grips to stretch it into any size you like. Create two more buttons and stretch them so that they appear similar to those shown in Figure 6. 3. Slowly click twice over a button to move the cursor inside the button, enabling you to change the button's label. If you click twice too quickly, a code window will appear instead. Close out any code windows that appear and try again if necessary, clicking slowly inside each button to move the cursor into the button text. 4. Change the label for each button so that CommandButton1 text reads Launch Excel, CommandButton2 text reads Close Excel, and CommandButton3 text reads Quit as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7: It is a helpful practice to include a Quit button in your primary UserForm to provide an easy means to stop your application when it is running. Your First Coded Object Now that you have finished the dialog box, it's time assign code to each button. Again, we're going to start very simple by writing the code for the Quit button. 1. Double-click the Quit button to bring up the button's code window. The code window shows a combo box with the value CommandButton3 in the upperleft corner so you know the code you're writing will pertain to this button only. In the upper-right corner of the code window is another combo box with value Click, which tells you that the code will be called up when this button is clicked while the

application is running. In the main part of the code window are two already typed statements:
Private Sub CommandButton3_Click() End Sub

2. Click between these two statements and enter the word End so that the code statement now appears as:
Private Sub CommandButton3_Click() End End Sub

Each button acts as a routine unto itself. The END command in Visual Basic terminates a running application. We're going to run our little program and use this button to stop it. The indenting of the command isn't vital to the program running correctly, but it does help keep command statements visually organized. 3. Close the code window. 4. From the Run pull-down menu, select Run Sub > UserForm menu item to launch our program. Your dialog box should appear over your AutoCAD session. Clicking on the upper two buttons will do nothing, but if you click the Quit button, you should return to the IDE. 5. Click the Quit button to terminate the program. You just ran your first program! You can also run a program by typing the F5 key when you are in the IDE. Launching and Closing Excel This next part is going to take some explaining. But first, let's get the code for the top two buttons assigned. 1. Double-click the Launch Excel button to bring up its code window and type the following code into it:

2. Likewise, double-click the Close Excel button to bring up its code window and type the following code into it:

Let's take a closer look at the code for the Launch Excel button. The code for this object begins by dimensioning variable excelApp as an Excel application object type, variable wbkObj as an Excel Workbook object type, and variable shtObj as an Excel Worksheet object type (all three of which are types now available to us with the excel 9.0 Object Library referenced). If any error occurs, the code is instructed to continue on instead of stopping at the error. The UserForm is hidden from view and the error state variable is cleared (set to a value of zero). Here's the relevant code:

Next, the application variable is set to a currently running session of Excel. This may seem a little weird at first, but the code does not start by launching Excel. Now, if Excel isn't running, this statement generates an error (which has a nonzero value). If an error is generated, then we know that Excel isn't running yet. So we clear the error state and use the CreateObject function to launch an Excel session. So we're essentially saying "If Excel is already running, set the variable to what is running. Otherwise, start up Excel." If launching Excel generates an error, we know that Excel isn't even installed. We report this through a message box exclamation function and end the program. Here's that code:

Once the application variable is set to either the currently running session of Excel or a new session of Excel, the UserForm is made visible again, and the workbook and worksheet variables are set to the first workbook and the first worksheet in that session. This done, the UserForm is made visible again so that we can click the buttons to close Excel down or quit our VBA program. Here's that code:

The code for the Close Excel button is fairly imitative of that for the Launch Excel button. Variable excelApp is dimensioned from scratch again in this procedure as an Excel application object type. The code is instructed again to continue if an error is encountered, the UserForm is hidden, and the error state is cleared. Variable excelAPP is set to an assumed already running session of Excel. If Excel isn't running (someone may click Close Excel firstafter all, you have to consider every possibility), an error is generated, and we are told Excel isn't running. If no error is generated, then the application quits. The UserForm is made visible again so that we can click our three buttons:

When running this VBA routine, it helps to use ALT+TAB to switch between Excel and AutoCAD after Excel has been launched. Viewing the Windows Task Manager (CTL+ALT+DEL) is also helpful to check if you've left any Excel application open. The code in the Close Excel button does shut down the currently running session, but if you check the Task Manager after using Close Excel, you should see an icon for the currently running Excel session. You can always shut down any Excel sessions through the Task Manager if needed. What happens if you press Launch Excel twice in a row? What happens if you then press Close Excel? In Conclusion In future segments we'll discuss how to pass information to Excel from our VBA routine, how to format that passed information, and how to channel it to a single cell or multiple cells and ranges. We'll also look at how to pull information from a

spreadsheet into a UserForm list box, edit box, combo box, and so on. For now, make sure you understand clearly how to make the Excel connection.