You can declare a variable as a public variable to make it available to all the procedures throughout the entire module. However, this not only makes the variable available to all procedures, but it can also be updateable by all procedures, whether or not it is meant. So there is a possibility that one procedure could affect another in an undesired way. This problem can be somewhat avoided by copying the public variable to a local variable at the procedure level. Doing this protects the variable at the local level from further updates.