How can I create a macro that acts on a relative reference rather than an absolute reference to cell A1?
- by Bruce
I have a master rent statement in an Excel 2007 (macro enabled) spreadsheet that shows all tenants in rows with columns formed by the months. Each tenant then has a separate rent statement sheet like the one below that pulls the data through from the master rent statement and all I do then is to copy the last 4 columns to the right and add them to the right, just renaming the month labelled as ‘rent due’ with the current month and then hiding the previous last 4 columns to the left so that the statement always shows the previous month's activity and the amount due for the current month:
I used a macro to speed up the creation of these statements, but then found that in some cases the result was wrong and needed major correction because the macro use absolute references i.e. its starting position was relative to cell A1 whereas some of my rent worksheets commence from a different column and in some cases from a different column and a different row.
I have tried recording the macro with 'Use relative references' but when trying to use the macro it only gets part way through its operation before it stops and the message appears:
Run time error '1004' Application defined or object defined error
with the option to End or Debug or go to Help and then I'm stuck as I don't know how to debug and work in VBA or understand what has gone wrong.
I want to record a single macro that always remains relative to the last 'Total Due' column heading (in the sample, it’s cell FF3 but on another worksheet could be cell GA26) and thus enables me regardless of where on the worksheet the rent statement is placed to add through my recorded macro a further four columns with updated dates and a repositioned 'Total Due' summary (in the sample in cells FE23 and FF23).
The contents of cells FE23 and FE22 are always the same number of rows from the 'Sample Rent Statement, Service Charge and Sub Total' rows. I've searched on the web and in the help files of Excel 2007 but have been totally stumped by this, so currently I have to re-record a quantity of macros each month to cover all of the permutations of the worksheets in my Excel rent workbook, which is starting to become pointless in terms of saving time.
Does someone know a solution to this problem please?!
