Making Excel functions affect 'other' cells

Question

Let\'s say that I create a Sub (not a function) whose mission in life is to take the active cell (i.e. Selection) and set an adjacent cell to some value. This works fine.

Answer 1

Thank you all for responding. It is possible to do this! Kinda. I say 'kinda' because technically speaking the 'function' isn't affecting the cells around it. Practically speaking, however, no user could tell the difference.

The trick is to use a Win32 API to start a timer, and as soon as it goes off you do what you want to to whatever cell and turn off the timer.

Now I'm not an expert on how COM threading works (although I know VBA is Single Apartment Threaded), but be careful about your Timer running away with your Excel process and crashing it. This is really not something I would suggest as a solution to every other spreadsheet.

Just Make a Module with these contents:

Option Explicit

Declare Function SetTimer Lib "user32" (ByVal HWnd As Long, _
  ByVal IDEvent As Long, ByVal mSec As Long, _
  ByVal CallFunc As Long) As Long

Declare Function KillTimer Lib "user32" (ByVal HWnd As Long, _
  ByVal timerId As Long) As Long

Private timerId As Long

Private wb As Workbook
Private rangeName As String
Private blnFinished As Boolean

Public Sub RunTimer()

    timerId = SetTimer(0, 0, 10, AddressOf Woohoo)


End Sub


Public Sub Woohoo()

    Dim i As Integer

'    For i = 0 To ThisWorkbook.Names.Count - 1
'        ThisWorkbook.Names(i).Delete
'    Next

     ThisWorkbook.Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("D8").Value = "Woohoo"

     KillTimer 0, timerId

End Sub