Question

I need to temporarily store my macro’s settings for each worksheet. I thought about extending the active sheet’s properties to store the settings there. The goal would be to read a property such as ActiveSheet.Setting1. I’ve tried wrapping the ActiveSheet object in a class:

“cCustomSheet” class module:

Public WithEvents WS As Worksheet
Public Setting1 As String

“Module1” module:

Dim ActiveWS As cCustomSheet
Sub test1()
    Set ActiveWS = New cCustomSheet
    Set ActiveWS.WS = ActiveSheet
End Sub
Sub test2()
    MsgBox ActiveWS.WS.Name
End Sub

This code works without an error, but ActiveWS should be updated to the new active sheet if the user activates another sheet, and it’s not. If I remove the Set keyword from the line Set ActiveWS.WS = ActiveSheet, I get the following error:

Error n° 91: Object variable or With block variable not set

How should I do it, and is this even possible?

I also thought about using ActiveSheet.CustomProperties but this seems rather clumsy since you can’t retrieve a setting by its name (without looping through all of the items), and you have to rely on index numbers.

Thanks in advance.

Update: I should add that my macro will be stored as an Excel Add-in, therefore I won’t have access to the code of the workbooks of the users. I cannot take advantage of the Worksheet_Activate() event to keep track of the active sheet. Also, the settings would preferably be lost or reset to their default values when the workbook is reopened, that’s why I can’t save them inside the user’s file (in a hidden sheet for example).

Answer 1

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. They have helped me finding a way to store my settings for each worksheet. I’ve used ActiveWorkbook.CustomDocumentProperties to assign a random ID to the active workbook. Each worksheet is identified by the concatenation of the workbook’s ID and the sheet’s codename (which is unique inside a workbook). The settings for the active worksheet are added to a collection where the sheet’s ID serves as the index, so that they can be retrieved easily.

This is not 100% safe since two workbooks can hypothetically get the same ID, since it’s a random number. The workbook’s ID is also saved to the Excel file. It becomes useless after the workbook is closed but “pollutes” the custom properties list of the file.

I also needed to store the address of the column holding the values on which to apply my macro. This is set by the user. Instead of storing the absolute address of the range, I’m using the .ID property of the first cell of the column. This way, if the user moves the cells, the ID sticks to the values. The downside is that I have to cycle through every cell of the first row of the selection to check if a cell holds an .ID value, which is quite inelegant. The .ID property is gone after the workbook is reopened, which is fine for me because I didn’t want the settings to be persistent.