VBA - Not Just For Programmers

VBA carries with it a sense of clique - it's for programmers only, not the average Office user who is well versed in the applications, but would never think of manipulating them to suit your taste. No, it's not coding (or rewriting code) as much as you may think and it's not risking making a programme unworkable. VBA is, in fact, a way to make your life easier - and who wouldn't want that?

Another myth about VBA is that you have to write a program or application from scratch. This isn't true and a great relief to those of you who are thinking of learning VBA but who find the prospect of a blank template to be filled with beautifully coded algorithms utterly terrifying. Most of us have heard of ActiveX Controls - if only to authorise our browsers to load them - but they are a typical component of VBA. You can simply edit existing code or use an open source 'library' of code, posted by other VBA users and have a play around with it. "Control" is the keyword here - they are the basic components of VBA. They're simple to learn, even for a non-coder and are easy to manipulate.

Let's say you're working in Word. Clicking the Developer tab (followed by Designs Mode), will give you some controls you can work with. Select on of them, and you're presented with the basic VBA editor, complete with some basic coding already (a bit like a web editing program inserting the starting tags in html). Working with VBA as a starting point, the best option to learn more is to start manipulating these controls.

To add a simple control, the UserForm function should be used within your document, then you can place controls on it. Forms hold the code in and are the essential element of working with VBA. You can also edit the form itself to get slightly different results. Coming from a non-programming perspective, you'll soon realise that VBA needn't be scary or technical. Forms, after all, are something most of us are already well-versed in on the web. Text boxes (usually created in Word, or again, in websites) are another way of adding a control to VBA.

The similarities between basic forms and the web continues with the necessity of the command button (almost like a 'submit' on a form) that executes the elements of VBA you've been working with. However, you do not always have to 'command' VBA to start its assigned task, it can be event driven - when a certain number of parameters are in place (let's say you finish processing your company payroll at the end of a month) - a simple VBA code will "recognise" you just did April, the end of the tax year, and will automatically 'know' to do the end-of-year totals. Most people know simple string arguments to create an event-driven piece of code (the old if x = y then.... School of thought). VBA is, thankfully, much smarter and more flexible than this.

Depending on what version of Office you have, (2007 is the one with the most VBA features so far, understandably), you need less and less programming know-how, as the features of Office have got more advanced with age. With the advent of Office 2010 on the horizon, why not have a go now?