Excel 2016 Power Programming with VBA

3 VBA Programming Fundamentals

In This Chapter

• Understanding VBA language elements, including variables, data types, constants, and arrays
• Using VBA built-in functions
• Manipulating objects and collections
• Controlling the execution of your procedures

VBA Language Elements: An Overview

If you’ve used other programming languages, much of the information in this chapter may sound familiar. However, VBA has a few unique wrinkles, so even experienced programmers may find some new information.

This chapter explores the VBA language elements, which are the keywords and control structures that you use to write VBA routines.

To get the ball rolling, take a look at a the following VBA Sub procedure. This simple procedure, which is stored in a VBA module, calculates the sum of the first 100 positive integers. When the code finishes executing, the procedure displays a message with the result.

Sub VBA_Demo()
'   This is a simple VBA Example
    Dim Total As Long, i As Long
    Total = 0
    For i = 1 To 100
        Total = Total + i
    Next i
    MsgBox Total
End Sub

This procedure uses some common VBA language elements, including:

• A comment (the line that begins with an apostrophe)
• A variable declaration statement (the line that begins with Dim)
• Two variables (Total and i)
• Two assignment statements (Total = 0 and Total = Total + i)
• A looping structure (For-Next)
• A VBA function (MsgBox)

You will explore all of these language elements in subsequent sections of this chapter.

Note

VBA procedures need not manipulate ...