Question

I would like a function to return the index of a column given the rowIndex and a Cell Value:

'Get index of column given a heading name
Function FindColumnIndex(name As String, rowNumber As Integer) As Integer
    Dim index As Integer
    index = 1
    Dim found As Boolean
    found = False

    Do While found = False
        If Cells(rowNumber, index).Value = name Then
            FindColumnIndex = index
            Exit Do
        End If

        index = index + 1
    Loop

    FindColumnIndex = index


End Function

I will then assign this to a value:

Dim colIndex As Integer
colIndex = FindColumnIndex("Physical or Virtual", 2)

Problem is this isn’t working – and I am sure my function is incorrect – Anyone know what I’m doing wrong?

Answer 1

One thing I spotted off the bat:

If Cells(row, index).Value = name Then

The variable passed to the function is named rowNumber, not row. Change that line to:

If Cells(rowNumber, index).Value = name Then

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edit:

One other thing to note is that your function never actually stops on its own. The only reason it ever ends is because it runs into an application defined error when trying to read column 16385 (because Excel is limited to 16384 columns*), which immediately kills the function, returning a #VALUE error.

The following revision prevents that and returns a -1 if the requested column name is not found:

Option Explicit

Function FindColumnIndex(name As String, rowNumber As Integer) As Integer
    Dim index As Integer
    index = 1
    Dim found As Boolean
    found = False

    FindColumnIndex = -1

    Do While found = False
        If Cells(rowNumber, index).Value = name Then
            FindColumnIndex = index
            found = True
        End If

        index = index + 1
        If index > 16384 Then Exit Do
    Loop

End Function

[ * Excel 2007 is thus limited, anyway. I have no idea if newer versions have larger limits or not.]