Learning VBA – Makes You Smarter

Last summer an intern joined our company and took us all by surprise. She helped us with a monthly project that typically took us about a week to complete. We did not have a very smart way of entering and analyzing data. She wrote simple programs in VBA and cut down our project reporting time by 10 hours per week. We were very impressed by her knowledge on VBA and we all decided to learn VBA, which we realized will help us to customize and control the different Microsoft Applications we use for monitoring our projects.

VBA and Its Applications

Visual Basic for Applications or VBA is a subset of VB (Visual Basic) which runs inside one of the Microsoft Office applications. A VB application is launched as an application in its own right, whereas the VBA program has to be launched by the host application, such as Word or Excel.

VBA is a modern programming language that is quite similar to other structured programming languages. It’s the programming language for Microsoft Office and its associated applications. One of the important applications of VBA is to use it to develop programs that control Excel. If you want to write on your resume that you are ‘proficient in Excel,’ then you are expected to have a good grip over VBA. If you need to automate some aspect of Excel, then writing codes in VBA is the obvious choice. VBA can be used to respond to events on forms and reports, and create custom functions. VBA is so popular and attractive in the programming world as it allows a level of customization beyond what is typically available in Microsoft Office products, such as Excel, Word and Power Point. A user types commands to create macros. Macros allow the user to automatically generate customized reports, charts and perform other data processing functions. Within the finance industry, VBA for Excel is commonly used to develop and maintain complex financial spreadsheet models. In the current age of information and technology, Financial Modeling is another area where VBA is used extensively.

VBA in EXCEL

VBA is used to control and extend the functionalities of Microsoft Excel. By learning to write VBA code you can unlock the true power of Excel and be able to do things which you earlier thought were not possible. VBA works by running macros, which are step-by-step procedures written in Visual Basic. One of the biggest uses of VBA in Excel is to automate repetitive tasks. But VBA is not just for repetitive tasks. You can also use VBA to build new capabilities in Excel, for example, develop new algorithms to analyze your data, use the charting capabilities in Excel to display the results, and integrate Excel with other Office applications such as Microsoft Access. The course Visual Basic for Excel – Microsoft VBA Excel Tutorial will make you familiar with the VBA programming language, as it applies to Microsoft Excel. It will teach you how to apply VBA programming language to make your Excel spreadsheets more powerful. This tutorial will guide you on how to create custom scripts using the VBA Programming Language and will teach you about VBA structures, the difference between Functions and Subroutines, how to manipulate Excel cells, how to interact with users and how to handle errors. After taking this course you will learn how to make interactive and fully functional spreadsheets.

VBA in Word

Even though Microsoft Word has several built-in features, but you always want improvements, extensions and ways to do away with repetitive jobs. To make things easier, Microsoft has provided macro development possibilities through the Visual Basic for Applications environment. VBA is edited through the Microsoft Visual Basic Editor. VBA can be used with Word to design a form and use VBA macros to ensure every detail of the user’s interaction are entered into the form. Word provides several ways to launch a VBA application. VBA UserForm is a custom dialog box, where you can add form fields for the variable content and into these fields users can enter the necessary information.  You can then write VBA code or use macros to power the form.

VBA in MS Access

Microsoft Access is another Microsoft product, which is used to create computer databases that can be used on a Microsoft Windows operating system, on a web site, or on a portable medium. Though a good performing database can be created by only using Microsoft Office Access, you may sometimes require more complex databases and may need to perform functions such as automate certain processes and tie your database objects together. These can be achieved by programming and writing codes in VBA. Learn VBA for Microsoft Access will orient you to the programming tools in Microsoft Office Access 2007 and will point you to some resources where you can learn more about programming.

Summary

Visual Basic is an easy to learn programming language and you can use it to develop Windows based applications and games. When you master VB you can advance further to learn VBA. You can become a smarter programmer when you use VBA codes and macros to automate Excel tasks. VBA will make your jobs in Excel, Word, and Access faster and will reduce repetitive manual labor. With the different online courses available from Udemy you can empower yourself to become a smarter and more powerful programmer. They will help you to climb your career ladder without having to take a break to update your knowledge. The courses are at your disposal which you can take as per your convenience and leisure.