Excel VBA Tutorial Part 7 - VBA Operators & Built-In Functions

VBA includes several built-in operators and functions, which can be used for building expressions or performing tasks in your VBA code.

Excel VBA Operators

The built-in VBA operators consist of mathematical operators, string operators, comparison operators and logical operators. The different types of Operators are discussed individually below.

Mathematical Operators

The main Mathematical VBA operators are listed in the table below.

The precedences that are listed alongside the operators are the defaults, which are applied in the absence of brackets. However, the order in which the VBA operators are applied can be controlled by adding brackets to an expression:

Operator	Action	Precedence (1=top; 5=bottom)
^	The power operator	1
*	The multiplication operator	2
/	The division operator	2
\	The integer division operator (divides two numbers and returns the integer result - e.g. 7\4 gives a result of 1)	3
Mod	The modulus operator (divides two numbers and returns the remainder - e.g. 8 Mod 3 gives a result of 2)	4
+	The addition operator	5
-	The subtraction operator	5

String Operators

The concatenate operator & can be used to join strings together.

Operator	Action
&	The concatenate operator (e.g. "A" & "B" gives the result "AB")

VBA Comparison Operators

Comparison operators compare two numbers or strings and return a logical (True or False) result. The main Excel VBA comparison operators are listed in the table below:

Operator	Action
=	Equal To
< >	Not Equal To
<	Less Than
>	Greater Than
<=	Less Than or Equal To
>=	Greater Than or Equal To

VBA Logical Operators

Logical operators also return a logical (True or False) result. The main Excel VBA logical operators are listed in the table below:

Operator	Action
And	Logical Operator And (e.g. the expression 'A And B' returns True if BOTH A AND B are true and returns False otherwise)
Or	Logical Operator Or (e.g. the expression 'A Or B' returns True if EITHER A OR B is true and returns False otherwise)
Not	Negates an evaluation (e.g. the expression 'Not A' returns True if A is false and returns False if A is true)

It should be noted that the above tables do not provide an exhaustive list of VBA operators. A more complete list can be obtained from the Visual Basic Developer Center Website

Built-In Functions

VBA also has a large number of built-in functions that are available to be used in your VBA code. Some of the more commonly used VBA functions are listed below:

Note that the above list only provides a small selection of some of the more commonly used Excel Visual Basic built-in functions. For a more detailed list of built-in VBA functions, see the VBA Functions page.

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