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XL: How to Continue a Visual Basic Statement from One Line to the Next

Article ID: 141513 - View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q141513

SUMMARY

To make Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications procedures easier to read, you may want to continue a line of code from one line to the next. To write code in this way, use the line-continuation character.

MORE INFORMATION

Microsoft provides programming examples for illustration only, without warranty either expressed or implied. This includes, but is not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This article assumes that you are familiar with the programming language that is being demonstrated and with the tools that are used to create and to debug procedures. Microsoft support engineers can help explain the functionality of a particular procedure, but they will not modify these examples to provide added functionality or construct procedures to meet your specific requirements. To continue a statement from one line to the next, type a space followed by the line-continuation character [the underscore character on your keyboard (_)]. In Microsoft Excel 5.0 and 7.0, you are limited to ten lines for continuation (that is, nine line-continuation characters). In Microsoft Excel 97 and Microsoft Excel 98, this limit is increased to 21 line- continuation characters. You can break a line at an operator, list separator, or period, as shown in the following statement:

Workbooks("MyBook.xls").Worksheets("Sheet1") _
   .Range("A1:B5").Value = _
   var1 + 3.14159

You cannot break statements in the middle of a keyword value or a text string. If you are using a long text string and need to continue the line, you can break the string into two strings and use a combination of the concatenation operator (&) and the line-continuation character, as shown in the following example:

var1 = "This is a long string that we are going to break"
MsgBox var1

var1 = "This is a long string th" & _
   "at we are going to break"
MsgBox var1

Properties

Article ID: 141513 - Last Review: October 11, 2006 - Revision: 2.3

APPLIES TO

Microsoft Excel 5.0 Standard Edition
Microsoft Excel 5.0c
Microsoft Excel 5.0 Standard Edition
Microsoft Excel 5.0 for Macintosh
Microsoft Excel 5.0a for Macintosh
Microsoft Excel 95 Standard Edition
Microsoft Excel 95a
Microsoft Excel 97 Standard Edition
Microsoft Excel 98 for Macintosh

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Retired KB Content Disclaimer

This article was written about products for which Microsoft no longer offers support. Therefore, this article is offered "as is" and will no longer be updated.