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Developer Team Blog

Debugging Keys for VBA, Access and Visual Basic Developers

Provided by: Luke Chung, President of FMS, Inc.

Microsoft Access, VBA, and Visual Basic developers are blessed by a powerful code debugging environment. Learning its features will help you code better and faster, and simplify applications testing and maintenance.

In addition to being able to change your code (within reason) while in the debugger, you have the immediate window, locals window, watch window, call stack and other resources under the View menu to help you debug and understand what your code is doing. Make sure you learn what these windows can do for you.

As you examine your code line-by-line, here are some keystrokes every VB/VBA developer should use within the IDE:

Keystroke Description - Shift-F2 Put the cursor on the variable, procedure, or property in question and press [Shift-F2] to see where it’s defined. You’ll jump directly to it. You can do this as often as you like to understand how your code works.

Ctrl-Shift-F2	Go back to where you came when you pressed [Shift F2]
F9	Set (or reset) a breakpoint to stop the program when it gets to this line
F5	Run the current procedure (if it doesn’t require parameters)
F8	Run the current line
Shift-F8	Step over the line by running the procedure on the current line without going into it and stepping through each line
Ctrl-Shift-F8	Run through the rest of the current procedure (useful if you no longer need to examine the procedure)
Ctrl-F9	Set the next statement (jump over existing code)

For more tips on debugging, read Luke Chung’s technical paper on Microsoft Access VBA/VB6 Debugging Tips and Techniques.

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