Dummies - Access 2007 VBA Programming For Dummie

Introduction

Welcome to Access 2007 VBA Programming For Dummies. As you already know (we hope), Microsoft Access is a huge database management program, offering lots of ways to manage data (information). Common uses of Access include managing mailing lists, memberships, scientific and statistical data, entire small businesses, and just about anything else that involves storing and managing large amounts of information.

As the title implies, this book is about using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to enhance the power of Access databases. If you want Access to print words on a check, skip mailing labels that you’ve already used, or manipulate data behind the scenes, you have to write VBA code.

By the time you finish this book, you should know exactly what VBA is all about and how it fits into Access. You’ll discover the meanings of all those obscure terms that programmers throw around — code, variable, array, loop, object — as though they were common knowledge. You’ll be able to write and use your own, custom code, just like advanced programmers do.

This book covers VBA in Access 2007. Although many changes and improvements to Access have occurred in all the versions that Microsoft has released, the VBA programming language has hardly changed a bit over the years. Although Access 2007 looks completely different from previous versions, the underlying objects are virtually unchanged. The code that you see in this book should also work in Access 2000, 2002, and 2003. The vast majority of the code in this book also works just fine even in last century’s versions, such as Access 97.