Excel 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

1

Primer in Excel VBA

This chapter is intended for those who are not familiar with Excel and the Excel macro recorder, or who are inexperienced with programming using the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language. If you are already comfortable with navigating around the features provided by Excel, have used the macro recorder, and have a working knowledge of VBA and the Visual Basic Editor (VBE), you might want to skip straight to Chapter 3.

If this is not the case, this chapter has been designed to provide you with the information you need to be able to move on comfortably to the more advanced features presented in the following chapters. We will be covering the following topics:

• The Excel macro recorder
• User-defined functions
• The Excel Object Model
• VBA programming concepts

Excel VBA is a programming application that allows you to use Visual Basic code to run the many features of the Excel package, thereby allowing you to customize your Excel applications. Units of VBA code are often referred to as macros. We will be covering more formal terminology in this chapter, but we will continue to use the term macro as a general way to refer to any VBA code.

In your day-to-day use of Excel, if you carry out the same sequence of commands repetitively, you can save a lot of time and effort by automating those steps using macros. If you are setting up an application for other users, who don't know much about Excel, you can use macros to create buttons and dialog boxes to guide them ...