Microsoft® Access® 2010 In Depth

29. Learning Visual Basic for Applications

Historically, productivity applications—such as the members of Microsoft Office—have used macros (short for macroinstructions) to automate repetitive operations. Microsoft Word and Excel, for instance, let you capture a sequence of menu choices, mouse clicks, and keyboard operations. You save the captured sequence as a macro that you subsequently execute from a menu choice or a shortcut-key combination. The macros in recent versions of Word and Excel consist of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code, but you don’t need to understand VBA programming to create and execute Word and Excel macros. Unfortunately, the keyboard and mouse actions you use with Access applications don’t translate to a usable ...