Workbook Object (Excel)

Represents a Microsoft Excel workbook.

Remarks

The Workbook object is a member of the Workbooks collection. The Workbooks collection contains all the Workbook objects currently open in Microsoft Excel.

ThisWorkbook Property

The ThisWorkbook property returns the workbook where the Visual Basic code is running. In most cases, this is the same as the active workbook. However, if the Visual Basic code is part of an add-in, the ThisWorkbook property won’t return the active workbook. In this case, the active workbook is the workbook calling the add-in, whereas the ThisWorkbook property returns the add-in workbook.

If you’ll be creating an add-in from your Visual Basic code, you should use the ThisWorkbook property to qualify any statement that must be run on the workbook you compile into the add-in.

Example

Use Workbooks(index), where index is the workbook name or index number, to return a single Workbook object. The following example activates workbook one.

Workbooks(1).Activate

The index number denotes the order in which the workbooks were opened or created. Workbooks(1) is the first workbook created, and Workbooks(Workbooks.Count) is the last one created. Activating a workbook doesn’t change its index number. All workbooks are included in the index count, even if they’re hidden.

The Name property returns the workbook name. You cannot set the name by using this property; if you need to change the name, use the SaveAs method to save the workbook under a different name. The following example activates Sheet1 in the workbook named Cogs.xls (the workbook must already be open in Microsoft Excel).

Workbooks("Cogs.xls").Worksheets("Sheet1").Activate

The ActiveWorkbook property returns the workbook that’s currently active. The following example sets the name of the author for the active workbook.

ActiveWorkbook.Author = "Jean Selva"

Sample code provided by: Holy Macro! Books, Holy Macro! It’s 2,500 Excel VBA Examples | About the Contributor

This example emails a worksheet tab from the active workbook using a specified email address and subject. To run this code, the active worksheet must contain the email address in cell A1, the subject in cell B1, and the name of the worksheet to send in cell C1.

Sub SendTab()
   'Declare and initialize your variables, and turn off screen updating.
   Dim wks As Worksheet
   Application.ScreenUpdating = False
   Set wks = ActiveSheet
   
   'Copy the target worksheet, specified in cell C1, to the clipboard.
   Worksheets(Range("C1").Value).Copy
   
   'Send the content in the clipboard to the email account specified in cell A1,
   'using the subject line specified in cell B1.
   ActiveWorkbook.SendMail wks.Range("A1").Value, wks.Range("B1").Value
   
   'Do not save changes and turn screen updating back on.
   ActiveWorkbook.Close savechanges:=False
   Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub

About the Contributor

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See Also

Concepts

Excel Object Model Reference

Workbook Object Members