What is the difference between .text, .value, and .value2?

Question

.Text gives you a string representing what is displayed on the screen for the cell. Using .Text is usually a bad idea because you could get ####

.Value2 gives you the underlying value of the cell (could be empty, string, error, number (double) or boolean)

.Value gives you the same as .Value2 except if the cell was formatted as currency or date it gives you a VBA currency (which may truncate decimal places) or VBA date.

Using .Value or .Text is usually a bad idea because you may not get the real value from the cell, and they are slower than .Value2

For a more extensive discussion see my Text vs Value vs Value2

Except first answer form Bathsheba, except MSDN information for:

.Value
.Value2
.Text

you could analyse these tables for better understanding of differences between analysed properties.

target.Value will give you a Variant type

target.Value2 will give you a Variant type as well but a Date is coerced to a Double

target.Text attempts to coerce to a String and will fail if the underlying Variant is not coercable to a String type

The safest thing to do is something like

Dim v As Variant
v = target.Value 'but if you don't want to handle date types use Value2

And check the type of the variant using VBA.VarType(v) before you attempt an explicit coercion.

Regarding conventions in C#. Let's say you're reading a cell that contains a date, e.g. 2014-10-22.

When using:

.Text, you'll get the formatted representation of the date, as seen in the workbook on-screen:
2014-10-22. This property's type is always string but may not always return a satisfactory result.

.Value, the compiler attempts to convert the date into a DateTime object: {2014-10-22 00:00:00} Most probably only useful when reading dates.

.Value2, gives you the real, underlying value of the cell. In the case for dates, it's a date serial: 41934. This property can have a different type depending on the contents of the cell. For date serials though, the type is double.

So you can retrieve and store the value of a cell in either dynamic, var or object but note that the value will always have some sort of innate type that you will have to act upon.

dynamic x = ws.get_Range("A1").Value2;
object  y = ws.get_Range("A1").Value2;
var     z = ws.get_Range("A1").Value2;
double  d = ws.get_Range("A1").Value2;      // Value of a serial is always a double

.Text is the formatted cell's displayed value; .Value is the value of the cell possibly augmented with date or currency indicators; .Value2 is the raw underlying value stripped of any extraneous information.

range("A1") = Date
range("A1").numberformat = "yyyy-mm-dd"
debug.print range("A1").text
debug.print range("A1").value
debug.print range("A1").value2

'results from Immediate window
2018-06-14
6/14/2018 
43265 

range("A1") = "abc"
range("A1").numberformat = "_(_(_(@"
debug.print range("A1").text
debug.print range("A1").value
debug.print range("A1").value2

'results from Immediate window
   abc
abc
abc

range("A1") = 12
range("A1").numberformat = "0 \m\m"
debug.print range("A1").text
debug.print range("A1").value
debug.print range("A1").value2

'results from Immediate window
12 mm
12
12

If you are processing the cell's value then reading the raw .Value2 is marginally faster than .Value or .Text. If you are locating errors then .Text will return something like #N/A as text and can be compared to a string while .Value and .Value2 will choke comparing their returned value to a string. If you have some custom cell formatting applied to your data then .Text may be the better choice when building a report.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how Value performed against Value2. After about 12 trials of similar processes, I could not see any significant differences in speed so I would always recommend using Value. I used the below code to run some tests with various ranges.

If anyone sees anything contrary regarding performance, please post.

Sub Trial_RUN()
    For t = 0 To 5
        TestValueMethod (True)
        TestValueMethod (False)
    Next t

End Sub




Sub TestValueMethod(useValue2 As Boolean)
Dim beginTime As Date, aCell As Range, rngAddress As String, ResultsColumn As Long
ResultsColumn = 5

'have some values in your RngAddress. in my case i put =Rand() in the cells, and then set to values
rngAddress = "A2:A399999" 'I changed this around on my sets.



With ThisWorkbook.Sheets(1)
.Range(rngAddress).Offset(0, 1).ClearContents


beginTime = Now

For Each aCell In .Range(rngAddress).Cells
    If useValue2 Then
        aCell.Offset(0, 1).Value2 = aCell.Value2 + aCell.Offset(-1, 1).Value2
    Else
        aCell.Offset(0, 1).Value = aCell.Value + aCell.Offset(-1, 1).Value
    End If

Next aCell

Dim Answer As String
 If useValue2 Then Answer = " using Value2"

.Cells(Rows.Count, ResultsColumn).End(xlUp).Offset(1, 0) = DateDiff("S", beginTime, Now) & _
            " seconds. For " & .Range(rngAddress).Cells.Count & " cells, at " & Now & Answer


End With


End Sub