Vista Ctrl+Space IME Toggle Workaround

If you start using Windows Vista Input Method Editor (IME) for Chinese, you may find that you can no longer use Ctrl+Space in some applications (e.g. to select a column in Excel, to activate autocomplete in IDEs such as VBA, Netbeans or Visual Studio, or to activate Firefox Ubiquity). One workaround is to define a different hotkey, such as Ctrl+Shift+F12, to toggle the IME.

If you have only one keyboard service and find that Ctrl+Space mysteriously starts to act as a toggle for an unselected IME (in my case, Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan)), the workaround is to add a keyboard service and define a different IME hotkey. You must define a hotkey for toggling the IME, otherwise the IME is activated using the default Ctrl+Space.

Reference

• No CONTROL over the SPACE being filled with CTRL+SPACE

VBA Is*() Functions Only Apply To Variant Types

VBA has several informational functions prefixed with "Is", such as IsNull(), IsMissing() and IsEmpty(), that only work with Variant types. I didn't realise it until I tried to apply them to non-Variant variables and noticed that they didn't work as I expected or always returned the same result.

For instance, if you define optional parameters for a procedure, you can only test if they are used in the procedure call using IsMissing() if the parameter is a Variant type. Using any other type of parameter with IsMissing() always returns False because all other parameter types have a default value supplied by the compiler or by the programmer.

Similarly, only Variant variables can have a Null value so that they can be tested by the IsNull() function. Object types can have a Nothing value, not Null, and can only be tested using the Is operator.

In the same vein, only Variant variables can be uninitialised and tested with IsEmpty(). All other variable types are initialised to some value (e.g. Objects are initialised to Nothing, Integers are initialised to 0).