VBA Like operator – using wildcards in conditional statements

The VBA Like operator is something so useful I am often surprised how rarely it is used in Excel and Access VBA.

I often tend to see the Like operator as the last resort before using Regular Expressions in VBA. It replaces greatly the VBA InStr function when needing to check if a certain substring is present within a certain string.

The main take-aways are:

• Use the VBA Like instead of the InStr function to check if a string contains a substring.
• Consider using the VBA Like before resorting to VBA Regular Expressions.
• Be sure to master string manipulation too!