Welcome to your first look at Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)! You might think that VBA is a secret code used by advanced computer users to intimidate the rest of us. Nothing could be further from the truth. VBA is all about doing things your way. When you want an application to perform a task in a certain way, use VBA to extend it. VBA makes you the boss. After you discover the wonders of VBA, you can customize a number of applications to make them work the way you want them to work.

VBA is a tool that empowers you to perform tasks you never thought possible in a fraction of the time that it takes to perform the task by hand. For example, you can add new toolbars, create custom reports, and perform special kinds of data analysis. When you write a VBA program, you become the master of your environment — someone who gets the job done quickly.

Over 500 readers of the previous edition of this ebook sent me e-mail, many of whom told me about their current projects. After reviewing those messages for this edition of the ebook, I can truly say that VBA is an amazing tool because you’re doing amazing things with it. After seeing everything that people are doing with VBA, it’s easy to say that this is the tool for everyone!

About This Book

VBA For Dummies, 5th Edition, is a reference book. You don’t have to read it in any particular order, and you can skip anything that you don’t find interesting. Readers who have VBA programming experience can skip to the advanced examples at the end of the book or explore new language elements as needed. That said, I did put the book into a logical order. When you begin at Chapter 1 and progress through the book chapter by chapter, you acquire a complete view of VBA, even if you’ve never used it.

This book contains many examples from my own library. I write VBA programs for all my applications that support it because I know that using VBA can save me time and effort. In addition, I write VBA programs for some of my consulting clients. This real-world approach to using VBA will help you get started quickly.

Some of the new examples are the result of my experiments with the new Ribbon interface. You’ll find that the Ribbon adds a new dimension to working with VBA and that it breaks some of your older code. Fortunately, you’ll find many of the answers for fixing your applications in this book.