Microsoft KB Archive/106500

= Text Concatenation Causes Error in Visual Basic Module =

Article ID: 106500

Article Last Modified on 10/11/2006

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Excel 95 Standard Edition
 * Microsoft Excel 5.0 Standard Edition
 * Microsoft Excel 5.0 for Macintosh

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This article was previously published under Q106500



SUMMARY
In Microsoft Excel, if you attempt to concatenate a text variable and a string without inserting a space after the variable, you may receive the following error message:

Expected: To or list separator or )



MORE INFORMATION
In general, when you use spaces in Visual Basic code, these spaces do not affect the meaning of the code. However, if you enter the following code Text="is a"  MsgBox("This "&Text&" Test") and you leave out a space between the variable name "Text" and the ampersand (&), you will receive the error message:

Expected: To or list separator or )

This error occurs because when an ampersand appears after a variable name, it is interpreted as a type-declaration character. In this example, the ampersand after the variable name "Text" indicates that Text is being declared as a Long data type. When the ampersand is interpreted this way, the rest of the line of code does not make sense. When you insert a space between the text variable and the ampersand, the ampersand character is recognized as the text concatenation operator and the error is eliminated.

You can also use the plus sign (+) for text concatenation as in the following example: Text="is a"  MsgBox("This " + Text + " Test") In the above example, spaces are added automatically.

