What does the Excel range.Rows property really do?

Question

OK, I am finishing up an add-on project for a legacy Excel-VBA application, and I have once again run up against the conundrum of the mysterious range.Rows (?) and

Answer 1

Range.Rows, Range.Columns and Range.Cells are Excel.Range objects, according to the VBA Type() functions:

?TypeName(Selection.rows)
Range

However, that's not the whole story: those returned objects are extended types that inherit every property and method from Excel::Range - but .Columns and .Rows have a special For... Each iterator, and a special .Count property that aren't quite the same as the parent Range object's iterator and count.

So .Cells is iterated and counted as a collection of single-cell ranges, just like the default iterator of the parent range.

But .Columns is iterated and counted as a collection of vertical subranges, each of them a single column wide;

...And .Rows is iterated and counted as a collection of horizontal subranges, each of them a single row high.

The easiest way to understand this is to step through this code and watch what's selected:

Public Sub Test() 

Dim SubRange As Range
Dim ParentRange As Range 

Set ParentRange = ActiveSheet.Range("B2:E5") 
 

For Each SubRange In ParentRange.Cells
    SubRange.Select
Next  

For Each SubRange In ParentRange.Rows
    SubRange.Select
Next 

For Each SubRange In ParentRange.Columns
    SubRange.Select
Next 

For Each SubRange In ParentRange
    SubRange.Select
Next 

End Sub

Enjoy. And try it with a couple of merged cells in there, just to see how odd merged ranges can be.