Microsoft Office® Access 2007 Inside Out

The Visual Basic Development Environment

In Access for Windows 95 (version 7.0), Visual Basic replaced the Access Basic programming language included with versions 1 and 2 of Access. The two languages are very similar because both Visual Basic and Access Basic evolved from a common design created before either product existed. (It’s called Visual Basic because it was the first version of Basic designed specifically for the Windows graphical environment.) In recent years, Visual Basic has become the common programming language for Microsoft Office applications, including Access, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Some of the 2007 Office system products (including Word and Excel) can work with an even newer variant of Visual Basic—Visual Basic .NET—but ...