Understanding ‘Me’ (no flowers, no bees)

You may have read that Me was a keyword, or that it was some kind of “special object that’s built into Excel”; or, you might have inferred that it’s some kind of hidden instance/module-level variable that’s only there in class/form/document modules: that’s pretty much how I was understanding Me, until I saw what the language specifications say about it (emphasis mine):

Within the <procedure-body> of a procedure declaration that is defined within a <class-module-code-section> the declared type of the reserved name Me is the named class defined by the enclosing class module and the data value of Me is an object reference to the object that is the target object of the currently active invocation of the function.

So Me is a reserved name… and it only exists in procedure scope; the type being the class it’s used in makes it easy for IntelliSense to know what the members are, but its value is ultimately provided by the caller – from section 5.3.1.5 “Parameter lists”:

Each procedure that is a method has an implicit ByVal parameter called the current object that corresponds to the target object of an invocation of the method. The current object acts as an anonymous local variable with procedure extent and whose declared type is the class name of the class module containing the method declaration. […]

In other words when you do this:

Dim foo As Class1
Set foo = New Class1
foo.DoSomething 42

What really happens under the hood is something like this:

Dim foo As Class1
Set foo = New Class1
Class1.DoSomething foo, 42

So every parameterless method you ever wrote like this:

Public Sub DoSomething()
End Sub

Is understood by VBA as this (assuming that method is in Class1):

Public Sub DoSomething(ByVal Me As Class1)
End Sub

…which, interestingly, is pretty much the same mechanics as the this pointer in C++.

So Me isn’t a magic keyword, and doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with Excel (or whatever your VBA host application is) – Me is simply a reserved name that allows us to refer to this hidden current object pointer inside a procedure scope, and that current object is whichever instance of the current class the calling code is working with.