Unexpected results from a Worksheet.Activate event - excel

Question

I’m running excel 2010 on windows 7.
The following macro does what you would expect, ie (1) inserts a new worksheet, (2) adds a rectangle, and (3) activates cell A1.
Sub addSheetAndButton()
Dim buttonSheet As Worksheet
Set buttonSheet = ThisWorkbook.Sheets.Add
buttonSheet.Shapes.AddShape(msoShapeRectangle, 100, 100, 100, 50).Select
buttonSheet.Range("A1").Activate
End Sub
My problem is when I try to run it with a Worksheet.Activate event, for example:
Private Sub Worksheet_Activate()
Call addSheetAndButton
End Sub
This time (1) a new worksheet is not inserted, (2) the rectangle is added to the worksheet associated with the activate event, (3) cell A1 is not activated and (4) the rectangle remains activated.
What am I doing wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Thanks very much for trying this. I’m sorry it has taken me a while to get back, but I’ve been experimenting with this. I have discovered that when I exit and restart Excel, the addSheetAndButton macro works as expected under the Worksheet.Activate event. However, I have a different macro that uses another Worksheet.Activate event to update some charts. On what seemed to be a random basis, this would create a “run time error 6” - an overflow that resulted from trying to assign an out of bounds value to a variable.
I never got this error if I bypassed the Worksheet.Activate event/macro and ran the chart update macro by hand. After resetting VBA/Excel from the “run time error 6”, the addSheetAndButton macro behaved exactly as I described in my original post. The only way to cure it was to exit and restart Excel.
I think (hope) that I have traced the source of the run time error back to a line in my chart update macro where I had selected rather than activated a worksheet before reading data from it – though I am surprised at the result. It is worth pointing out that once Excel entered the “not as expected” state, the on-screen message from the following two lines was the name of the previous active sheet and not “Sheet1”.
Worksheets(“Sheet1”).Activate
Msgbox ActiveSheet.Name
Again, the only apparent way to cure this was to exit and restart Excel.
Thanks again for your help.