Question

How should I define large strings in VBA? Is there a better way than coding something like the below?

Dim largeString as String
largeString = "This is a long block of text that I want to fill " & _
              "into a form field. I need to make sure I pay attention " & _
              "to spacing and carriage return issues while doing so. " & _
              "I also have to use quotes liberally, the concatenation " & _
              "operator, and the continuance underscore to make sure " & _
              "VBA can parse my code." & vbCr & vbCr & _
              "It's kind of a pain in the ass and I wish I could use " & _
              "a heredoc instead, letting me copy and paste the block" & _
              "of text I need from another source and shove it into " & _
              "a string."

Edit: Ugh, and there’s a 25 line continuation limit too? So much for nice indenting and 80 characters of width, that only gives me enough room for a couple decent paragraphs.

Answer 1

No, this is as good as it gets.

For really long strings it might be an option to keep the string in a separate file, or use some application feature. For example, in Word, you might want to store the string in a document variable, as hidden text or AutoText. In Excel, you might consider a hidden sheet for storing long string constants.