Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming, Third Edition

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

Not all macros are keyboard based. In addition to keyboard-recording macros, many macros provide additional commands that go beyond the simple selection of menu options. Again, each application may support its own set of macro commands, but Microsoft standardized Visual Basic among all applications a few years ago. The result was Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

Even non-Microsoft products have begun to provide support for VBA as the internal macro language for the application. If the VBA trend continues, eventually all applications could support the same macro language. (The keyboard-recording macro capabilities will probably differ among applications, however, because applications have different menus.) ...