Introduction to VBA

Introduction to VBA: In this topic we will try to understand basics in Excel VBA. What are the different things we can do with VBA? How its help us.

Introduction to VBA:

VBA is a programming language for MS Office Application, which stands for Visual Basic for Applications; it allows you to automate the task which you are doing manually and repeatedly. Most of the times, we do the same kind of tasks daily in our day to day work, you can automate it using VBA.

VBA is a common language for all MS Office Tools (Excel, Word, PowerPoint,Outlook,Access), if you learn Excel VBA, you can able to automate any MS Office Tool , the only change is object model.

Why should I learn VBA? What things can we do using VBA?

We can do many things using VBA:

• … we can automate the repeated tasks
• … we can automate hourly, daily,weekly,monthly or yearly generated reports
• … we can prepare rich and interactive Excel Dashboards
• … we can automate PowerPoint presentations
• … we can automate Word documentation
• … we can connect to various database to get the data and prepare the reports
• … want can build the tools
• … we can interact with other applications, including MS Office Tools
• … we can automate the other applications like SAS, MINI TAB, etc …
• … and we can do many more things using VBA based on your data and requirement

For example …

• » We copy some data from different sources and paste it in a worksheet and doing some manipulations and then we will format it and send it to the client
• » We may extract some data from a database to an Excel sheet, and then we will clean the data and create some reports and send through email

Most of the times the input data may vary, but the remaining steps may be same and we perform the same task on the data and send the output to the clients.

Many of us do the similar kind of work daily; there may be some change in the data but not the structure of the data, process steps which we execute to deliver the output.

VBA helps to who…

• … do not like doing the same things manually & repeatedly
• … wants to save the process time by automating the tasks
• … wants to generate the interactive reports
• … want to develop the tools for the team
• … want to make a difference
• … want to save project execution time and spend the time on exploring the new things or technologies
• … want to automate any Office Tool and Other Applications like SAS

We can automate the tasks using VBA in 2 different ways:

• 1. By Recording a Macro: You can record a macro for simple tasks, using Record Macro utilities provided in Excel, you do not need any programming skills to record a macro.
• 2. By VBA Programming: You can write VBA programming in VBE (Visual Basic Environment) Editor to automate any task. It requires VBA programming skills and you can automate simple to complex level tasks

In this basic tutorials, we focus on the first method, Recording Macro for automation.
You can learn VBA Programming and Advanced Techniques to do more using VBA.