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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T14:23:55+00:00

I’ve been asked to tune the performance of a specific function which loads every

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I’ve been asked to tune the performance of a specific function which loads every time a worksheet is opened (so it’s important that it doesn’t make things slow). One of the things that seems to make this function slow is that it does a long call to the database (which is remote), but there are a bunch of other possibilities too. So far, I’ve been stepping through the code, and when something seems to take a long time making a note of it as a candidate for tuning.

I’d like a more objective way to tell which calls are slowing me down. Searching for timing and VBA yields a lot of results which basically amount to “Write a counter, and start and stop it either side of the critical section” (often with the macro explicitly called). I was wondering whether there was a way to (in the debugger) do something like “Step to next line, and tell me the time elapsed“.

If not, can someone suggest a reasonable macro that I could use in the Immediate window to get what I’m after? Specifically, I would like to be able to time an arbitrary line of code within a larger procedure (rather than a whole procedure at once, which is what I found through Google).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Keywords for your further search would be to look for a “Profiler” for VBA. I’ve heard of VB Watch and VBA Code Profiler System (VBACP) as well as from Stephen Bull’s PerfMon, but sparing the latter they’re mostly not free.

    So far for the official part of my answer, and I toss in some extra in terms of maybe useless suggestions:
    Identifying “slow” code by “humanly measurement” (run a line and say: “Woah, that takes forever”) in the debugger is certainly helpful, and you can then start looking into why they’re slow. Your remote database call may take quite long if it has to transmit a lot of data – in which cases it may be a good idea to timestamp the data on both ends and ask the DB whether data had been modified before you grab it.
    Writing the data into the sheet may be slow depending on the way you write it – which can sometimes be improved by writing arrays to a range instead of some form of iteration.
    And I probably don’t need to tell you about ScreenUpdating and EnableEvents and so on?

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