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Part I
Understanding the BASICs
Lesson 1
Introducing VBA
Welcome to your first lesson in Excel VBA 24-Hour Trainer! A good place to start is at the beginning, where you'll find it useful to get an understanding of where Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) comes from and what VBA is today. After you get a feel for how VBA fits into the overall Excel universe, you find out how to use VBA to manipulate Excel in ways you might never have thought possible.
What is VBA?
VBA is a programming language created by Microsoft to automate operations in applications that support it, such as Excel. VBA is an enormously powerful tool that enables you to control Excel in countless ways that you cannot do – or would not want to do – manually.
In fact, VBA is also the language that manipulates Microsoft Office applications in Access, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. For the purposes here, VBA is the tool you use to develop macros and manipulate objects to control Excel and to control other Office applications from Excel.
You do not need to purchase anything more than the Office suite (or the individual application) to also own VBA. If you have Excel on your computer, you have VBA on your computer.
WHAT IS A “MACRO,” ANYWAY?
Back in the day, a programming language was often called a “macro language” if its capabilities included the automation of a sequence of commands in spreadsheet or word-processing applications. With Microsoft's release of Office 5, VBA set a new bar for how robust a programming language can be, with capabilities extending far beyond those of earlier programming languages, such as the ability to create and control objects within Excel or to have access to disk drives and networks.
So VBA is a programming language, and it is also a macro language. Confusion of terminology arises when referring to VBA code that is a series of commands written and executed in Excel. Is it a macro, a procedure, or a program? Microsoft commonly refers to its VBA procedures as macros, so that's good enough for me to call them macros also. Outside of a few exceptions that I explain when the time comes, I refer to VBA procedures as macros.
A Brief History of VBA
VBA is a present-day dialect of the BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language that was developed in the 1960s. BASIC became widely used in many software applications throughout the next two decades because it was easy to learn and understand.
Over the years, BASIC has evolved and improved in response to advancing technology and increased demands by its users for greater programming flexibility. In 1985, Microsoft released a much richer version of BASIC, named QuickBASIC, which boasted the most up-to-date features found in programming languages of the day. In 1992, Microsoft released Visual Basic for Windows, designed to work within the burgeoning Windows environment.
Meanwhile,