Office 2013 In Depth

Understanding Macros

Macros created in the Office applications are saved in a scripting language called Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA. Creating macros in VBA only scratches the surface of what you can accomplish using the VBA scripting language. Developers use VBA to create add-ons and other special tools for the various Office applications. VBA can enhance the user interface for an Office application by creating new Ribbon tabs and commands for those tabs.

VBA is an object-oriented programming language. This means that it is designed to manipulate different classes of objects, which is exactly what is necessary for a programming language to work in an environment such as Office, where many different object types are found in ...