Excel & VBA: Skip calculating formula in Macro - vba

Question

I'm having a rather simple issue with Macro. In it, I assign a formula to a cell. I would like it not to calculate it at first and do calculation only after some other part of Macro is finished. I thought I would do something like this:
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
Cells(StartRow, 4 + i).Formula = "FORMULA"
...
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic
But that doesn't work. It stops automatic calculations, but not for that cell - it still performs the calculation right after I assign the formula. Is there a way to skip it?
To clarify the exact prupose of this: in my actual code I'm assigning a formula to a group of cells in a cycle. Everytime I assign it to one cell - it calculates it. I figured if I will first assign them all and then do the calculation - it would be faster. As a matter of fact it is. So instead of assigning it in a cycle, I assign it to the first cell and then do autofill. Autofilled formulas wait until I enable automatic calculation and I get a much faster macro. However, the initial assignemnt is still calculated which makes macro almost twice as slow.

Answer 1

place the formula in the cell with a prefix character
continue the macro
"activate" the formula
for example:
Sub dural()
With Range("A1")
.Value = "'=1+2"
MsgBox " "
.Value = .Value
End With
End Sub

Answer 2

#Alex, you can delay the calculation as #Gary answer. However, you was asking the question because you need "SPEED to CYCLE through cells" while assign a formula, right?
If yes, from my point of view, if you are NOT using the formulas until ALL the formulas are assigned in the excel sheet, you will gain a lot of speed by writing all the formulas at once using an array (a single step in VBA).
The procedure is: first put all the formulas to an VBA array of strings, and later on to use for example Range("B1:B100").Formula = ArrayWithFormulas. In that example you are assigning 100 formulas at once, without recalculation in between.
You will see a large improve in SPEED if use an array to write all the cells at ones instead of writing cell by cell! (Don't loop using cells(r,c+i) if you have a lot of cells to go through). Here one example:
Sub CreateBunchOfFormulas()
Dim i As Long
Dim ARRAY_OF_FORMULAS() As Variant 'Note: Don't replace Variant by String!
ReDim ARRAY_OF_FORMULAS(1 To 100, 1 To 1)
' For Vertical use: (1 to NumRows,1 to 1)
' for Horizontal: (1 to 1,1 to NumCols)
' for 2D use: (1 to NumRows,1 to NumCols)
'Create the formulas...
For i = 1 To 100
ARRAY_OF_FORMULAS(i, 1) = "=1+3+" & i ' Or any other formula...
Next i
' <-- your extra code here...
' (New formulas won't be calculated. They are not in the Excel sheet yet!
' If you want that no other old formula to recalculate use the old trick:
' Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual )
'At the very end, write the formulas in the excel at once...
Range("B1:B100").Formula = ARRAY_OF_FORMULAS
End Sub
If you want an extra delay in the new formula, then you can use #Gary trick, but applied to a range, not to a single cell. For that start the formulas with a ' like '=1+2 and add the following code at the end:
'... previous code, but now formulas starting with (')
Range("B1:B100").Formula = ARRAY_OF_FORMULAS
'Formulas not calculated yet, until next line is executed
Range("B1:B100").Value = Range("B1:B100").Value ' <~~ #Gary's trick
End Sub
Last, a small snipped: if your formulas are in a horizontal arrangement (Means one formula for column A, other for column B, etc) and just a small number of columns, then you can keep in mind the a shorter version of previous code:
Dim a as Variant 'Note that no () needed
a = Array("=1+3","=4+8","=5*A1","=sum(A1:C1)")
Range("A1:D1").Formula = ARRAY_OF_FORMULA ' Just a single row
' or...
Range("A1:D100").Formula = ARRAY_OF_FORMULA ' If you want to repeat formulas
' in several rows.
Finally, You can use the method .FormulaR1C1 instead of .Formula in all the previous code examples, if you want an easy way to use relative references in your formula...
Hope this helps!