Beginning to learn VBA

Beginning to learn VBA

CA Vikram Shankar Mathur

This document should get you started with how to program in the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in Microsoft Excel and the other MSOffice365 products straight off. Cheers !

So,  what is VBA?

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) Introduced:

When you are in any of the three applications mentioned above, and specifically in Microsoft Excel, pressing [Alt]+[F11]  would bring you into what is called the VBE (Visual Basic Editor) window, where you would see what would look somewhat like the figure below.

Visual Basic Editor (VBE)

Want to insert a picture from your files or add a shape, text box, or table? You got it! On the Insert tab of the ribbon, just tap the option you need.

The ‘elusive’ Developer Tab

Oh, before I forget, you will need to make the ‘Developer’ tab visible in your Microsoft Office (Excel/Word) application, if you wish to quickly access the VBA Window from the main application. To do this, you need to access [File->Options->Customize Ribbon] to reach the screen depicted below:

Why Learn VBA?

Basically, VBA is not meant for the weak-hearted or the person who wants thing-done-0in-a-jiffy!! To elucidate the point, it took me a good 15+ years to evolve to the point that I could consider myself worthy of making this first post on any of my blogs. Admittedly, I got a hefty kick-start in the start of my career in 1989, when my boss insisted that I prepare all my documentation to be submitted to him on the computer. At that time, we only had WordStar as the word processor, Lotus 1-2-3 as the spreadsheet and dBase/FoxBase as the database programs.

Well, let me not digress here, to conclude this post, I evolved into the Microsoft Excel’95 world without much effort, thanks to my experience of Macro-Programming in Lotus 1-2-3. The real question here, however, is where do you (the layman reading this blog, not the experts who read it for whatever reason 😊 😊 ). I will answer that question in my next post, where I will go one step ahead in getting you stated on actually writing your first “Macro” in either Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word.

Thanks for reading so patiently.

CA VIKRAM S. MATHUR

03-Sep-2019 | 13:50 Hours IST