VBA

Support for Running Simulations from Macros or Scripts

The basic function for running a simulation from VBA looks like this:

Application.Run "RiskAMP.RunSimulation", Trials, Echo, Block

The function takes three arguments:


Trials	The number of trials to run. If you omit this argument, the command will open the simulation dialog but won’t start running.
Echo	Whether to show screen updates. Set to True to show screen updates while running.
Block	Whether VBA should wait for the simulation to complete. See below for an explanation of blocking.

Here’s a complete example:

'
' this subrutine will run 1000 iterations. it will block, so the
' message box will show up after the simulation is complete.
'
Sub RunSimulation() 
   Application.Run "RiskAMP.RunSimulation", 1000, False, True 
   MsgBox "Simulation complete" 
End Sub

About blocking

If the Block parameter is set to False, the function will return immediately after starting a simulation. If all you are doing is running a simulation from a button in the spreadsheet, this is probably fine.

If however you want your script to analyze the results of the simulation, you probably want to block execution until the simulation is complete.

That’s what the Block parameter does. It tells VBA to wait until the simulation is complete before running the next line of code. In the example above, because it’s set to block, the message box will not show up until the simulation has finished.

If you set Block to False in that example, though, the message box will pop up immediately after the simulation starts.

Blocking and screen updates

Note that screen updates and blocking don’t work together. If you are blocking VBA, that will have the effect of blocking screen updates as well.