Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most.

Teams

Q&A for work

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

I wish to know how this would impact my coding when handling large volumes of data, and how I would construct my logic arguments

Two questions:

1) What are the main differences between IF-ELSE and Select CASE? Does select case operate by evaluating all cases at the same time?

If I have a situation where, by nature of its construction, need to fulfill two or more cases at the same time, for e.g.

int = 5
Select case int
Case >0
Case 5
Case <0
Where I would need to "trigger" both Cases "1" and "2" for action, do I use CASE over IF ELSE?
2) Now for the other case, if I have a variable that will trigger more one case but I would like to restrict to only one case by priority, say I would only like Case "1" for action and exclude the rest, am I right to say that IF-ELSE would triumph in this regard?
EDIT - I realized that my question was phrased poorly. I did some edits to the code
as you suggested, you can combine several values in one Case switch in VBA, e.g.: Case Is>40, 20, 10, 2 To 3, for more information see documentation on MSDN
It'll execute at most one Case, it'll exit after finding a match (e.g. in the example execute Case >0 then exit without even evaluating Case 5)
It'll only evaluate your variable / expression once and use this same value for all comparisons in contrary to nested if which evaluates multiple time
if you want to execute "both" for a value you can nest if within case:   
Case Is > 0
    <Common code>
    If i = 5 Then
        <code only for  case 5>
    End If
Advantage of Select Case
It's more efficient when your decision is about multiple values of a single variant / expression
it also can be very useful when your expression is e.g. result of a time consuming function, in this case you really can save time compared to if  
Advantage of If
Basically it's the good option in all the cases which are not described for  Select Case e.g.: 
you have only two options to choose from (it's the same time with both if and select, but if is easier to read)
you have multiple expressions to consider during decision and you can't easily convert them to a single value
Similarly to Select Case you can also use elseif to prepare multiple comparisons, it'll also stops at first fullfilled criteria, but here your expression will be evaluated every time until finding the match and of course you can use more complex criteria.
                As an example for case you can't have multiple same values case 1: val = 5, case 2: val = 8, case 3: val=5 case will always exit case1 in a loop and you won't get to case 3.  This is where if is useful.
– bottledatthesource
                Dec 12, 2021 at 22:17
If-Else and Switch statement are good in different cases. 
For example, If-Else has logic conditions like:
if (n < 5 && a > 5) { } // && is a logical AND
and nested constructions like
if (n < 5) {
   if (n < 0)
} else { }
You cannot do this in switch statement.
However, switch is better, more elegant and faster in some situations:
switch (a)
    case 1:
    case 2:
    case 3:
        // ...
        break;
    case 4:
        break; 
    case 5:
        break;
    case 6:
        break;
    case 10:
        break;    
    default:
        break;
would look very bad in if-else format:
if (a == 1 || a == 2 || a == 3)
    if (a == 4)
        // ...
I'm not sure about your case but in most languages switch statement is more performant.
Simply said, use switch statement every time it is possible and there are more than two cases. If there are only two cases or it is impossible to use switch - use if.
                The question is about VBA and your answer I think is kind of C (C++, C#), could you please change it?
– Máté Juhász
                Jun 11, 2015 at 6:23
        
Thanks for contributing an answer to Stack Overflow!
Please be sure to answer the question. Provide details and share your research!
But avoid …
Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers.
Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience.
To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers.