Create Excel Timer Using VBA

    Today I'm going to show you how to create a Excel Timer. First we need to add two buttons to the excel sheet. One is to start timer. Other one is to stop the timer. And we need to reserve one cell to display the value. Here is an example interface.

We can give it nice look by removing grid-lines.

Now add new module in the VBA editor of your workbook. And add below code to it.

Public StopMacro As Boolean Sub StartTimer() StopMacro = False Dim WS As Worksheet Set WS = Worksheets("Sheet1") Dim StartTime, timeNow StartTime = Now Do Until StopMacro = True     DoEvents     timeNow = Now     WS.Range("F8").Value = Format(timeNow - StartTime, "hh:mm:ss") Loop End Sub Sub StopTimer() StopMacro = True End Sub

Then assign StartTimer macro to start button and StopTimer macro to Stop button. I think you will able to understand this code easily. However I will explain few important points. In this program we have declared one public variable of type Boolean. We use that variable to detect when user click stop button. So when user click stop button, value of StopMacro variable become true. Then it is detected in do until loop.

In this program we used inbuilt Excel function call Now which returns date and time.

Value entering cell and format of the value is given by below line of code.

WS.Range("F8").Value = Format(timeNow - StartTime, "hh:mm:ss")

Also it is very important to use DoEvents within the do until loop. Otherwise user will not get any chance to click on the stop button and loop will become infinite loop.

Do Until StopMacro = True     DoEvents     timeNow = Now     WS.Range("F8").Value = Format(timeNow - StartTime, "hh:mm:ss") Loop

And this is how timer shows the time.