Function marked as restricted or uses a type not supported in Visual Basic

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This page is specific to the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) Language Reference for Office 2010.

Not every procedure that appears in a type library or object library can be accessed by every programming language. The creator of a type or object library can designate some functions as restricted to prevent their use by macro languages. This error has the following causes and solutions:

  • You tried to use a function with a restricted specification. You can't use the function in your program. If you have documentation for the object represented by the library, check to see if a method is provided that gives equivalent functionality.

  • You tried to use a function that requires a parameter type or has a return type that isn't available in Visual Basic.

    Sometimes you can simulate return types with Visual Basic equivalents. Check the subtypes of the Variant data type . This may also work for non-Basic parameter types that are expected as references. However, you can't pass a Variant data type by value in an effort to simulate a non-Basic type.

For additional information, select the item in question and press F1 (in Windows) or HELP (on the Macintosh).