.Select, .Activesheet, .Activecell etc…

Question

For this question, I refer to the post below to clarify myself:
Why is my conditional format offset when added by VBA?

In many, many posts I see these days, OP\'

Answer 1

From my perspective, with few exceptions, the only time you should use Select is as a user input, and only then after careful consideration of alternative design/UI requirements.

For example, I'd say it's generally not advisable to rely on Selection to let user define a Range object when this method keeps execution within the code:

Dim myRange as Range
Set myRange = Application.InputBox("Select your range", Type:=8)

However, if you need to prompt users to select a particular shape or object on the worksheet, then maybe it's better to let them make a Selection (however, this can open up a Pandora's Box of problems without good error-handling and logic to prevent undesired user actions...).

Here is an example of one such exception that I have in PowerPoint. I have some RibbonUI XML and VBA that adds buttons to the Shapes right-click context menu in PowerPoint, and adds similar buttons to the Ribbon itself. These are seamless UI that give the end-user a more "native" experience with the application -- users want to be able to right-click the chart and then run some macro procedures against that selected chart or table, etc. They don't want to press a button to open up a user form and scroll through a listbox of generic shape names or GUIDs.

The procedure code needs to examine the Selection in order to handle it properly so I can use something like below, where

Sub UpdateOrEditSelection(update As Boolean)
'This procedure invoked when user edits/updates a chart.
Dim uid As Variant
Dim sel As Selection
Dim s As Integer
Dim chartsToUpdate As Object
Dim multipleShapes As Boolean
Dim sld As Slide
Set sel = ppPres.Windows(1).Selection

If update Then
    Set chartsToUpdate = CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary")
    Select Case sel.Type
        Case ppSelectionShapes
            For s = 1 To sel.ShapeRange.count
                uid = sel.ShapeRange(s).Name
                '....
                '...
                '..
                '.
            Next
        Case ppSelectionSlides
            For Each sld In sel.SlideRange
                For s = 1 To sld.Shapes.count
                    uid = sld.Shapes(s).Name
                    '....
                    '...
                    '..
                    '.

                Next
            Next
        Case ppSelectionText
            s = 1
            If sel.ShapeRange(s).HasTable Or sel.ShapeRange(s).HasChart Then
                uid = sel.ShapeRange(s).Name
                '....
                '...
                '..
                '.

            End If
    End Select
 '....
 '...
 '..
 '.

Where does it come from?

The Macro Recorder. Essentially, this feature records every literal user input: scrolling, selecting, viewing, activating, default properties, etc., to the point of overkill. While this is sometimes helpful, it does encourage bad code written by people who don't know that it's bad, but I will not belabor that point which has been made here:

How to avoid using Select in Excel VBA macros

What is better, conceptually?

Program to the objects directly. If you're merely using VBA to mimic keystrokes and mouseclicks, you're doing it wrong.

Exceptions:

I've found when applying formatting to series data in charts, where Select is occasionally necessary. This seems IMO to be a bug with Excel and not a design feature.

Other applications (because VBA is not only Excel):

• Word is a different animal, which relies a lot more on Selection object
• In PowerPoint there are some sort of operations that can only be performed when the application and slide/shape are visible or otherwise in view. While you don't usually need to "select" anything, it does require more cumbersome code.

I found this snippet in my App:

    Set tb = cht.Shapes.AddTextbox(msoTextOrientationHorizontal, ptLeft, tBoxTop, ptWidth, ptHeight)
    tb.Select  '<--- KEEP THIS LINE OTHERWISE TEXTBOX ALIGNMENT WILL NOT WORK ## ## ##

And this:

    'PPT requires selecting the slide in order to export an image preview/jpg
sld.Select
ppPres.Windows(1).View.GotoSlide sld.SlideIndex
sld.Shapes(1).Chart.Export imgPath, ppShapeFormatJPG

And this, dealing with individual Point objects:

        pt.Select
        pt.format.Line.Visible = msoTrue
        pt.format.Line.Visible = msoFalse
        pt.MarkerSize = pt.MarkerSize + 2

This is not an exhaustive list, just some examples of exceptions that I found. While these were from PowerPoint, the charts in PowerPoint use the same object model as Excel so I would not be surprised if some of these also need to be hacked in Excel, and Word, too.

• Outlook: I don't do much with Outlook, it is a lot like Word and actually uses the Word object model in the Inspector, but what little I do with Outlook does rely on things like ActiveInspector, etc.

Neither Word or PowerPoint have a "macro recorder" anymore (actually, I think Word might but it's so damn impotent as to be useless) and by the time most people do any development in other applications, they've figured most of this out already.