Actually his usage of a private variable was correct, because otherwords he would have to keep drilling down the object model to get the value in each conditional, and it's better to incur the performance overhead of allocating a new variable once than to keep traversing the object model more than once in a loop like that. "Real" VB (which is NOT the same as VBA) gives you the With statement which prevents the need for this additional variable. What he did actually makes the code more readable as well. Keep in mind that VBA is meant for simple macros, so there is really no horror in what he did, even with macros. Gotos are considered bad because they lead to spaghetti code smells in applications that have grown beyond a particular size, but used in a small macro situation they can greatly enhance readability if used properly. I'm not trying to wave the VB banner, I actually bailed on it quite some time ago only using it when I have to, simply because most good developers chose to focus on C#, thus it's easier to go with the flow and I like C-like syntaxes. But most VB-bigots are not as smart as they think they are and would feel quite stupid for making blanket statements about VB if they knew all the facts. I've seen really amazing, robust, well-performing apps written in both VB6 and VB.Net, and VB itself incorporates many elements of Pascal which is an excellent language. I do agree that the relative simplicity of getting started with VB led to an influx of bad programmers (many of which got flushed out in the dot com bust), or people who were uneducated in formal CS concepts or simply were not technical or motivated enough to make a career committment to good programming, but at the same time I've worked with some real idiots whose background was in Java or C++. I always thought Microsft screwed up by keeping the whole "BASIC" moniker... when they came out with .Net they should have just named it B++ or B# or something that made more sense, because despite a few syntax differences it is much closer to C# than it is to the original BASIC.