Deleting VBA Code in a Copied Worksheet

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated August 1, 2020)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021


1

Peter regularly needs to copy a master worksheet to a copy in a new workbook. He can do this just fine with VBA. However, the worksheet that he's copying has code associated with it, and the code gets copied too. Peter doesn't want the code in the copy, but he does want it left in the original. He wonders if there is a way, in his macro, to delete the worksheet code in the just-copied worksheet.

How you go about this depends on how you want the finished workbook (the one to which you are copying) to look. Primarily, will the finished workbook contain macros—any macros—or not? If the answer is no, it won't contain any macros, then you can easily accomplish the task by saving the new workbook in XLSX format. That way Excel takes care of getting rid of all the macros for you. You can do this by including a line in your code similar to the following when you save your workbook:

ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs FileName:="MyExcelFile.xlsx", _
  FileFormat:=xlOpenXMLWorkbook

If, however, you only want to get rid of the worksheet code but save the new workbook with any other macro code intact, then you'll need to take a different approach. In this instance, you could include the following line in your macro:

ActiveWorkbook.VBProject.VBComponents("Sheet1")

This assumes that the new workbook is the active workbook, and that the worksheet whose code you want to delete is named Sheet1. You could also use these lines to accomplish the same task:

wsName = ActiveSheet.CodeName
With ThisWorkbook.VBProject.VBComponents(wsName).CodeModule
    .DeleteLines 1, .CountOfLines
End With

Note that wsName should be declared as a string variable.

For a boatload of other ways you can affect different code modules programmatically, you can't go wrong by referring to Chip Pearson's excellent information here:

http://cpearson.com/excel/vbe.aspx

Note:

If you would like to know how to use the macros described on this page (or on any other page on the ExcelTips sites), I've prepared a special page that includes helpful information. Click here to open that special page in a new browser tab.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (7612) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is 3 + 5?

2020-08-01 07:20:29

Peter

Thanks for your help. It ran smoothly and did exactly what I wanted. The copy of the spreadsheet then saved as an .xlsx

The only significant change I made was to replace ThisWorkbook with ActiveWorkbook:
With ActiveWorkbook.VBProject.VBComponents(ActiveSheet.CodeName).CodeModule
.DeleteLines 1, .CountOfLines
End With
Otherwise it would have deleted code in my source spreadsheet where the code was running.
I also found it caused an error if the code window that was to be cleared was open in the VBA editor.
Thanks again, Peter


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