VBA Programming Series...01

VBA, which stands for Visual Basic for Applications, is a programming lan-guage developed by Microsoft — you know, the company that tries to get you to buy a new version of Windows every few years. Excel, along with the other members of Microsoft Office, includes the VBA language (at no extra charge). In a nutshell, VBA is the tool that people like you and me use to develop pro-grams that control Excel.

Imagine an intelligent robot that knows all about Excel. This robot can read instructions, and it can also operate Excel very fast and accurately. When you want the robot to do something in Excel, you write up a set of robot instruc-tions by using special codes. Tell the robot to follow your instructions, while you sit back and drink a glass of lemonade. That’s kind of what VBA is all about — a code language for robots. Note, however, that Excel does not come with a robot or lemonade.

A few words about terminology

Excel programming terminology can be a bit confusing. For example, VBA is a programming language, but it also serves as a macro lan-guage. What do you call something written in VBA and executed in Excel? Is it a macro, or is it a program? Excel’s Help system often refers to VBA procedures as macros, so I use that ter-minology. But I also call this stuff a program.

I use the term automate throughout this book. This term means that a series of steps are completed automatically. For example, if you write a macro that adds color to some cells, prints the worksheet, and then removes the color, you have automated those three steps.

By the way, macro does not stand for Messy And Confusing Repeated Operation. Rather, it comes from the Greek makros, which means large — which also describes your paycheck after you become an expert macro programmer.

You’re probably aware that people use Excel for thousands of different tasks.

Here are just a few examples:

✓ Analyzing scientific data ✓ Budgeting and forecasting

✓ Creating invoices and other forms ✓ Developing charts from data

✓ Keeping lists of things such as customers’ names, students’ grades, or holiday gift ideas (a nice fruitcake would be lovely)

The list could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. My point is simply that Excel is used for a wide variety of things, and everyone reading this book has different needs and expectations regarding Excel. One thing virtually every reader has in common is the need to automate some aspect of Excel. That, dear reader, is what VBA is all about.

For example, you might create a VBA program to import some numbers, and then format and print your month-end sales report. After developing and test-ing the program, you can execute the macro with a single command, causing Excel to automatically perform many time-consuming procedures. Rather than struggle through a tedious sequence of commands, you can grab a cup of joe and let your computer do the work — which is how it’s supposed to be, right?

In the following sections, I briefly describe some common uses for VBA macros. One or two of these may push your button.