Put entire column (each value in column) in an array? - vba

Question

So i'm making a macro to do a bunch of things. one thing is find duplicates of cells in sheet1 from sheet2. given columnA in sheet 1, do any values in columnB on sheet2 match any of the values in columna sheet1.
I know theres a remove duplicates, but I just want to mark them, not remove.
I was thinking something with the filtering. I know when you filter you can select multiple criteria, so if u have a column with 20 different values in it, you can select 5 values in the filter and it will show rows with those 5 values for the particular column. So i recorded a macro of that, and checked out the code, and I see for that it uses a string array, where each value to search for is in a string array. Is there any way to just specify an entire column and add every value to the string array?
thanks in advance

Answer 1

Here are three different ways to load items into an array. The first method is much faster but simply stores everything in the column. You have to be careful with this though because it creates a multidimensional array which isn't something that can be passed to AutoFilter.
Method 1:
Sub LoadArray()
Dim strArray As Variant
Dim TotalRows As Long
TotalRows = Rows(Rows.Count).End(xlUp).Row
strArray = Range(Cells(1, 1), Cells(TotalRows, 1)).Value
MsgBox "Loaded " & UBound(strArray) & " items!"
End Sub
Method 2:
Sub LoadArray2()
Dim strArray() As String
Dim TotalRows As Long
Dim i As Long
TotalRows = Rows(Rows.Count).End(xlUp).Row
ReDim strArray(1 To TotalRows)
For i = 1 To TotalRows
strArray(i) = Cells(i, 1).Value
Next
MsgBox "Loaded " & UBound(strArray) & " items!"
End Sub
if you know the values ahead of time and just want to list them in a variable you can assign a variant using Array()
Sub LoadArray3()
Dim strArray As Variant
strArray = Array("Value1", "Value2", "Value3", "Value4")
MsgBox "Loaded " & UBound(strArray) + 1 & " items!"
End Sub

Answer 2

not sure if anyone else will have this problem or not so I figured I'd post the answer I found. I like the solution of the array posted by #Ripster (and thanks for that, it almost worked) but it won't really work in this case. What I'm working with is a large sheet of data with 1 ID column, and I want to check other sheets to see if there are duplicates in that sheet (using ID column). not delete though, just mark so I can check them out. With potentially upwards of 50K rows looping through each row would take a LONG time.
So, what I figured out I can do is copy the ID column from the other sheet into the main sheet, and use the conditional formatting option to mark duplicates in some colour. (It'll mark the rows in both columns) and then I can filter the column by colour to show me only the colour I used to mark the duplicates. If I programmatically add a column to the sheet I'm checking with the row numbers, I can even include that column in the main sheet so when I filter for colour I can see which rows they were in their sheet.
After doing that I can record and adapt a macro to do this automatically for my less programming inclined co-workers
Thanks much all!
Edit - Added Code
After selecting the columns to compare, here is the code to mark the duplicates with red text and no fill:
Selection.FormatConditions.AddUniqueValues
Selection.FormatConditions(Selection.FormatConditions.Count).SetFirstPriority
Selection.FormatConditions(1).DupeUnique = xlDuplicate
With Selection.FormatConditions(1).Font
.Color = -16383844
.TintAndShade = 0
End With
Selection.FormatConditions(1).StopIfTrue = False
and then, since both columns have the duplicates marked you select the one that you actually want to examine and heres the code to filter:
`Selection.AutoFilter
ActiveSheet.Range("$C$1:$C$12").AutoFilter Field:=1, Criteria1:=RGB(156, 0 _
, 6), Operator:=xlFilterFontColor`
(in my test i used column c as the one to filter, that can be programmatically with a cells() reference or a range(cells(), cells()) sort of reference
I wish everyone the best of luck in their future endevors! thanks again to #ripster