Access® 2010 Bible

Chapter 10. VBA Programming Fundamentals

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Working with VBA

• Reviewing VBA terminology

• Understanding VBA code basics

• Moving from macros to VBA

• Writing VBA code

• Adding branching constructs

• Understanding objects and collections

• Understanding developer options

Most Access developers use macros now and then. Although macros provide a quick and easy way to automate an application, writing Visual Basic for applications (VBA) modules is the best way to create applications. VBA provides data access, looping and branching, and other features that macros simply don't support — or at least don't support with the flexibility most developers want. In this chapter, you learn how to use VBA to extend the power and usefulness of your applications.

Note

Use the database file Chapter10.accdb in this chapter.

Note

Although many readers of this book are experienced Access developers and are comfortable working with VBA, this chapter and the other chapters in this part of the book assume that you have no experience with VBA. I include these chapters to provide you with a firm foundation for many of the techniques I discuss in later chapters. As you'll see in Part III and beyond, many advanced Access techniques simply can't be implemented without the use of VBA code.

The limitations of macros

For a number of reasons, this book doesn't extensively cover Access macro creation. To begin with, there are enough important topics that I had to choose which topics to cover in detail. Plus, macros are pretty easy ...