In VBA the Rows property has a weird behavior

Question

I am trying to figure out how to work on a specific row among a big range. However it appears that a range created with the rows property does not behave the same as a simple ra

Answer 1

You should expect weird behavior if you're passing indexed properties the incorrect parameters. As demonstrated by your code, the Range returned by SourceRng.Rows(i) is actually correct. It just isn't doing what you think it's doing. The Rows property of a Range just returns a pointer to the exact same Range object that it was called on. You can see that in its typelib definition:

HRESULT _stdcall Rows([out, retval] Range** RHS);

Note that it doesn't take any parameters. The returned Range object is what you're providing the indexing for, and you're indexing it based on it's default property of Item (technically it's _Default, but the 2 are interchangeable). The first parameter (which is the only one you're passing with Rows(i), is RowIndex. So Rows(i) is exactly the same thing as Rows.Item(RowIndex:=i). You can actually see this in the IntelliSense tooltip that pops up when you provide a Row index:

Excel handles the indexing differently on this call though, because providing any value parameter for the second parameter is a Run-time error '1004'. Note that a similar property call is going on when you call SpecificRow(1).Address. Again, the default property of Range is Range.Item(), so you're specifying a row again - not a column. SpecificRow(1).Address is exactly the same thing as SpecificRow.Item(RowIndex:=1).Address.

The oddity in Excel appears to be that the Range returned by Range.Rows "forgets" the fact that it was called within the context of a Rows call and doesn't suppress the column indexer anymore. Remember from the typelib definition above that the object returned is just a pointer back to the original Range object. That means SpecificRow(2) "leaks" out of the narrowed context.

All things considered, I'd say the Excel Rows implementation is somewhat of a hack. Application.Intersect(SpecificRow, SpecificRow) is apparently giving you back a new "hard" Range object, but the last 2 lines of code are not what you should consider "correct" behavior. Again, when you provide only the first parameter to Range.Items, it is declared as the RowIndex:

What appears to happen is that Excel determines that there is only one row in the Range at this point and just assumes that the single parameter passed is a ColumnIndex.

As pointed out by @CallumDA, you can avoid all of this squirrelly behavior by not relying on default properties at all and explicitly providing all of the indexes that you need, i.e.:

Debug.Print SpecificRow.Item(1, 1).Address
'...or...
Debug.Print SpecificRow.Cells(1, 1).Address