Excel 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

2

Programming in the VBE

At least as far back as Borland's early Turbo Pascal editor for DOS, modern programmers have had the luxury of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). An IDE is an editor like Notepad or MS-Word that is customized specifically for writing programming language code. The Visual Basic Editor (VBE) is an IDE that ships with every application supporting VBA, including MS-Excel. Thus, if you know how to use one VBE and VBA then you know how to use them all. All that remains is to learn the object model for each Office application you want to write code for, fortunately the Help documentation will answer many of your questions here.

This is a programming book, so it will be helpful for you to become familiar with the VBE. If you are an experienced VBA programmer and have used the VBE before, then just browse the sections of this chapter to see if there are any new techniques that you weren't previously aware of, or you can skip to Chapter 4. If you are a new VBA programmer, then reading this chapter will help you optimize your code writing and debugging experience.

Writing Code

Computers don't care about words or grammar. A computer only cares about bits and bytes. Even low-level languages that have a very simple grammar, like assembler, aren't treated any differently than the more high-level languages. Only the compiler and people care about programming languages and grammar. Since the compiler's job is to convert the programming language into bits and bytes ...