The Daily Dose

Hey, remember back in 2010 when I had that bright idea about a repurposing Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn? Sure you do. The idea was that when I’m at the end of a workbook with a lot of worksheets, it would be easier to hit Ctrl+PgDn and wrap around to the first sheet rather than hold down Ctrl+PgUp until I got to the first sheet. I gave that shortcut the ol’ college try, but in the end I abandoned it. It turns out that I like holding down Ctrl+PgUp to get to the first page. But when I do that and this utility is active, it blows right by the first page and wraps around.

There’s this thing called Fitts’ Law and it indicates some things about infinity

Fitts’ law indicates that the most quickly accessed targets on any computer display are the four corners of the screen, because of their pinning action, and yet, for years, they seemed to be avoided at all costs by designers.

Fitts’ Law deals with pointing devices and targets, but the same principle applies to hotkeys. In Excel, if you hold down Ctrl+PgDn for infinity, you will end up on the last visible sheet of your workbook. That’s powerful because it removes all of your precision responsibility. I don’t care how imprecise you are, you can certainly hit an infinitely wide barn. Contrast that with the File menu in Excel 2010. Press Alt+F and then hold the down arrow for infinity. If the UI designers had been paying attention you would end up on “Exit” (the last item on the list), but you don’t. The cursor just keeps looping through the items on the list.

Even though I abandoned the hotkey, I can’t seem to get it out of my head that it’s a good idea. I’m stubborn like that. What if I could have the best of both worlds? What if I could race to the end of a workbook by holding down Ctrl+PgDn, but still wrap around to the first sheet when I wanted to? I changed the code to add a little delay. I started with 1 second, but determined that 1/2 second works better. Now, if the time between the last time I pressed Ctrl+PgDn and now is greater that 0.5 seconds, sheet activation will wrap around to the first sheet. If it’s less than 0.5 seconds, it’s assumed that I’m looking for infinity and remains on the last worksheet. And it all works the same for Ctrl+PgUp, just in reverse. I start with a module level variable and a module level constant.

The Single msnLastWrap will keep track of the last time I pressed the hotkey. The rest of the code is the same from the prior post except that I added a couple of If statements to check the time differential and of course to set msnLastWrap.

In WrapSheetsDown when it gets to the last sheet (ActiveSheet.Index = LastVisibleSheetIndex) it checks to see how much time has elapsed (Timer – msnLastWrap). Timer is a VBA function that returns the number of seconds since midnight. Regardless of the results of that test, I assign Timer to my module level variable.

The rest of the code is unchanged, but for completeness, here’s what I have in my Auto_Open and Auto_Close procedures respectively.

And the rest of the procedures needed.