Excel VBA 24-Hour Trainer

Tom Urtis

• Publisher: Wrox
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118991374
• eBook ISBN: 9781118991411
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Desktop Applications
• Index: Computer Science

Master VBA automation quickly and easily to get more out of Excel

Excel VBA 24-Hour Trainer, 2 nd Edition is the quick-start guide to getting more out of Excel, using Visual Basic for Applications. This unique book/video package has been updated with fifteen new advanced video lessons, providing a total of eleven hours of video training and 45 total lessons to teach you the basics and beyond. This self-paced tutorial explains Excel VBA from the ground up, demonstrating with each advancing lesson how you can increase your productivity. Clear, concise, step-by-step instructions are combined with illustrations, code examples, and downloadable workbooks to give you a practical, in-depth learning experience and results that apply to real-world scenarios.

This is your comprehensive guide to becoming a true Excel power user, with multimedia instruction and plenty of hands-on practice.

• Program Excel's newest chart and pivot table object models
• Manipulate the user interface to customize the look and feel of a project
• Utilize message boxes, input boxes, and loops to yield customized logical results
• Interact with and manipulate Word, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook from Excel

If you're ready to get more out of this incredibly functional program, Excel VBA 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition provides the expert instruction and fast, hands-on learning you need.

Part I
Understanding the BASICs

Lesson 1: Introducing VBA

Lesson 2: Getting Started with Macros

Lesson 3: Introducing the Visual Basic Editor

Lesson 4: Working in the VBE

Lesson 1
Introducing VBA

Welcome to your first lesson in Excel VBA 24-Hour Trainer! A good place to start is at the beginning, where you'll find it useful to get an understanding of where Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) comes from and what VBA is today. After you get a feel for how VBA fits into the overall Excel universe, you find out how to use VBA to manipulate Excel in ways you might never have thought possible.

What is VBA?

VBA is a programming language created by Microsoft to automate operations in applications that support it, such as Excel. VBA is an enormously powerful tool that enables you to control Excel in countless ways that you cannot do—or would not want to do—manually.

In fact, VBA is also the language that manipulates Microsoft Office applications in Access, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. For the purposes here, VBA is the tool you use to develop macros and manipulate objects to control Excel and to control other Office applications from Excel.

You do not need to purchase anything more than the Office suite (or the individual application) to also own VBA. If you have Excel on your computer, you have VBA on your computer.

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WHAT IS A “MACRO,” ANYWAY?

Back in the day, a programming language was often called a “macro language” if its capabilities included the automation of a sequence of commands in spreadsheet or word-processing applications. With Microsoft's release of Office 5, VBA set a new bar for how robust a programming language can be, with capabilities extending far beyond those of earlier programming languages, such as the ability to create and control objects within Excel or to have access to disk drives and networks.

So VBA is a programming language, and it is also a macro language. Confusion of terminology arises when referring to VBA code that is a series of commands written and executed in Excel. Is it a macro, a procedure, or a program? Microsoft commonly refers to its VBA procedures as macros, so that's good enough for me to call them macros also. Outside of a few exceptions that I explain when the time comes, I refer to VBA procedures as macros.

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A Brief History of VBA

VBA is a present-day dialect of the BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language that was developed in the 1960s. BASIC became widely used in many software applications throughout the next two decades because it was easy to learn and understand.

Over the years, BASIC has evolved and improved in response to advancing technology and increased demands by its users for greater programming flexibility. In 1985, Microsoft released a much richer version of BASIC, named QuickBASIC, which boasted the most up-to-date features found in programming languages of the day. In 1992, Microsoft released Visual Basic for Windows, designed to work within the burgeoning Windows environment.

Meanwhile, various software publishers were making their own enhancements to BASIC for their products' programming languages, resulting in a wide and confusing range of functionality and commands among software applications that were using BASIC. Microsoft recognized the need for developing a standardized programming language for its software products, and created Visual Basic for Applications.

VBA was first released by Microsoft with Excel 5 in the Office 1995 suite. Since then, VBA has become the programming language for Microsoft's other popular Office applications, as well as for external software customers of Microsoft to whom VBA has been licensed for use.

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THERE'S A BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VB AND VBA!

With all the acronyms bandied about in the world of computing, it's easy to get some terms confused. VB stands for Visual Basic, and it is not the same as VBA. Though both VB and VBA are programming languages derived from BASIC and created by Microsoft, they are otherwise very different.

VB is a language that enables you to create standalone executable applications that do not even require its users to have Office or Excel loaded onto their computers. VBA cannot create standalone applications, and it exists within a host application such as Excel and the workbook containing the VBA code. For a VBA macro to run, its host application workbook must be open. This book is about VBA and how it controls Excel.

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What VBA Can Do for You

Everyone reading this book uses Excel for their own needs, such as financial budgeting, forecasting, analyzing scientific data, creating invoices, or charting the progr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Understanding the BASICs
• Part II: Diving Deeper into VBA
• Part III: Beyond the Macro Recorder: Writing Your Own Code
• Part IV: Advanced Programming Techniques
• Part V: Interacting with Other Office Applications
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• End User License Agreement