Book VIII
Programming in VBA
Find out about using VBA to change form controls at
www.dummies.com/extras/access2013aio.
Contents at a Glance
Chapter 1: What the Heck Is VBA?
Chapter 2: Writing Code
Chapter 3: Writing Smarter Code
Chapter 4: Controlling Forms with VBA
Chapter 5: Using SQL and Recordsets
Chapter 6: Debugging Your Code
Chapter 1: What the Heck Is VBA?
In This Chapter
Understanding Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code Using Visual Basic Editor Working with other people’s code Visual Basic for Applications, often abbreviated VBA, is a programming language that you can use to extend the functionality of Microsoft Access and other products in the Microsoft Office suite of programs. A programming language is a means of writing instructions for the computer to execute (perform). Programmers often refer to the written instructions as code because the instructions aren’t in plain English. Rather, they’re in a language that the computer can interpret and execute.
You can create sophisticated Access databases without using VBA at all. In most cases, the other objects offered by Access — tables, queries, forms, reports, and macros — offer more than enough flexibility and power to create just about any database imaginable. Once in a while, though, you want to do something that none of those other objects can do. That’s where VBA comes in. If you can find no other way to accomplish some goal in Access, writing VBA code usually is the solution.
Getting Acquainted with VBA Code
So what the heck is VBA code, anyway? To the untrained eye, VBA code looks like gibberish — perhaps some secret code written by aliens from another planet. But to Access, the code represents very specific instructions on how to perform some task.
Within any given database, Access stores code in two places:
Class modules (code-behind forms): Every form and report you create automatically contains a
class module (also called a
code-behind form), as illustrated in
Figure 1-1. The class module for a given form or report is empty unless you place controls in that form or report that require VBA code.
Figure 1-1: Every form and every report has a class module behind it.
Standard modules: Code can also be stored in
standard modules. Code in standard modules is accessible to all objects in your database, not just a single form or report.
Opening a class module
If you want to view or change the code for a form or report’s class module, first open, in Design view, the form or report to which the module is attached. Then click the (Form Design Tools) Design tab, and click the View Code button in the Tools group, shown near the mouse pointer in Figure 1-2.
Figure 1-2: The View Code button.
You can also get to a class module from the Event tab of the proper...
