Reason for Invalid Qualifier Error in VBA

What is an Invalid Qualifier Error in VBA

Invalid Qualifier Error occurs when you use a property or a method with a variable or an object, and the property and method don’t exist for this. It’s a compile error, meaning there is some problem while writing the code. Let’s say you have a variable that is declared as a Long.

And then, you are trying to use a property with it which doesn’t exist.

See the above example; the variable “iNumber” is declared as Long. Now, we have used the property value while assigning a value to it. The problem is that the “Value” property isn’t available with this variable.

Sub invalid_qualifier()
Dim iNumber As Long
iNumber.Value = 50
End Sub

Another example to understand it is that we have a variable where we need to store the current date as a string to show it in a message box to the user. When we try to use the variable to the value from it using the value property, it returns the Invalid Qualifier Compile error.

How do you trace and correct the invalid qualifier error?

In both cases above, we used the “Value” property when unavailable. To correct this error, you can only find the line of code where the error is. The best way to do this is to run the code line by line. You can use the keyboard shortcut F8 or the Step into button from the toolbar.

Other than this, if you don’t use this way, VBA is smart enough to select the variable where an error has occurred.

We need to correct the value property from the examples we have used.

Sub invalid_qualifier()
Dim iNumber As Long
iNumber = 50
End Sub
Sub invalid_qualifier_1()
Dim iTotal As String
iTotal = Format(Now, "Long Date")
MsgBox iTotal
End Sub

You won’t face an Invalid Qualifier error when you run these codes.

In the first example, with the variable “iNumber,” we removed the “.Value” property and assigned it to it. In the second example, we have removed “.Value” property from the variable “iTotal”.

Important Notes

• While writing a code, you can use Object Browser (F2) to check all the available methods and properties with an object.
• The more you write codes, the less likely you will have an Invalid Qualifier error.

Correcting the Invalid Qualifier is simple; you only need to change or remove the incorrect property or method. Otherwise, you can learn more about handling errors in VBA; check this out.