VBA: Comparing single cells between entire rows - excel

Question

I have been working with conditional formatting and I thought how it would look like if replaced with a "manual" comparison in VBA.
Let's say I want to compare cells between Row 1 and Row 2, meaning I compare A1 to A2, B1 to B2 etc. Whenever the value in row 2 is bigger, I want to highlight this in row 2.
If I don't want to do this with conditional formatting, how do I go about this? Do I have to loop through the cells to compare or is there a way to do it without a loop? With a loop it should look like this:
Option Explicit
Sub Testing()
Dim ws As Worksheet
Dim i As Long
Dim rng As Range
Set ws = ThisWorkbook.ActiveSheet
Set rng = ws.Range("A2:E2")
For i = 1 To rng.Count
If ws.Cells(2, i).Value > ws.Cells(1, i).Value Then
ws.Cells(2, i).Interior.ColorIndex = 44
End If
Next
End Sub
Is there a way to use less code to achieve the same result? I'm just wondering if I'm unaware of some smarter, alternative way to go about this.

Answer 1

"Is there a way to use less code to achieve the same result?"
Wouldn't recommend this for multiple reasons, but it can be done in a one-liner:
With Sheet1
.Range(Join(Filter(.[IF(A2:E2>A1:E1,CHAR(COLUMN(A2:E2)+64)&2,"%")], "%", False), ",")).Interior.ColorIndex = 44
End With
Why does this work:
.[IF(A2:E2>A1:E1,CHAR(COLUMN(A2:E2)+64)&2,"%")] is short for the Application.Evaluate method. Anything between .[..] is basically a Worksheet.Function where VBA is smart enough to know I want to return an array of results. The . in front would make this refer to Sheet1. Resulting array > {"A2","B2","%","%","E2"}
Filter function (not really known) would take this array, and output an resulting array, filtering out the "%" values. Hence the FALSE parameter. Resulting array > {"A2","B2","E2"}
Then the Join function would concatenate this array into a string using a "," as delimiter. Rather basic, resulting in "A2,B2,E2"
This, on its turn, is a valid Range.Address we can use withing the Range(...) reference. Once we have our Range object we can set it's Interior property with the intended ColorIndex value.
Why would I not recommend this:
While readability may already be an issue, .[..] does not take variables, meaning a dynamic array will need to be written with the .Evaluate(..) method instead, including variables, extra quotes etc. adding to the issues with readability.
While VBA is smart enough to recognize we need an array returned, this may become sluggish on large Range object. A small one like in the example is no problem at all though.
Range address can have a maximum of 255 characters. Larger arrays mean larger strings, meaning a larger change this is going to return an error at some point.
There are ways to overcome the above, but really would be too much effort preventing the obvious > Use the build-in conditional formatting instead (or if you must, your current code is nice and clean too).