Workbook Object

Represents a Microsoft Excel workbook. The Workbook object is a member of the Workbooks collection. The Workbooks collection contains all the Workbook objects currently open in Microsoft Excel.

Using the Workbook Object

The following properties for returning a Workbook object are described in this section:

• Workbooks property
• ActiveWorkbook property
• ThisWorkbook property

Workbooks Property

Use Workbooks(index), where index is the workbook name or index number, to return a single Workbook object. The following example activates workbook one.

Workbooks(1).Activate
		

The index number denotes the order in which the workbooks were opened or created. Workbooks(1) is the first workbook created, and Workbooks(Workbooks.Count) is the last one created. Activating a workbook doesn’t change its index number. All workbooks are included in the index count, even if they’re hidden.

The Name property returns the workbook name. You cannot set the name by using this property; if you need to change the name, use the SaveAs method to save the workbook under a different name. The following example activates Sheet1 in the workbook named Cogs.xls (the workbook must already be open in Microsoft Excel).

Workbooks("Cogs.xls").Worksheets("Sheet1").Activate
		

ActiveWorkbook Property

The ActiveWorkbook property returns the workbook that’s currently active. The following example sets the name of the author for the active workbook.

ActiveWorkbook.Author = "Jean Selva"
		

ThisWorkbook Property

The ThisWorkbook property returns the workbook where the Visual Basic code is running. In most cases, this is the same as the active workbook. However, if the Visual Basic code is part of an add-in, the ThisWorkbook property won’t return the active workbook. In this case, the active workbook is the workbook calling the add-in, whereas the ThisWorkbook property returns the add-in workbook.

If you’ll be creating an add-in from your Visual Basic code, you should use the ThisWorkbook property to qualify any statement that must be run on the workbook you compile into the add-in.