Making Office work for you with VBA Macros

Don’t be a slave to your computer!!

Introduction to VBA Macros

You may have heard references to VBA or Macros in the past, but what are they?

VBA

VBA, or Visual Basic for Applications, allows users to increase and improve the functionality of some programs by making more use of menus, tool-bars and options already available in the program running the code and also allowing the user to create their own forms, automate tasks, run calculations, etc.

VBA is closely related to Visual Basic and uses the VB library, but unlike VB, it needs a program (or host application) to run it.  For example a macro can be written in VBA and run by Excel, but the macro cannot be run as a program on its own.  Visual Basic code can create standalone programs.

VBA is part of Microsoft Office applications and other Microsoft programs.

Macro

Macro is short for “macroinsturction”.  They are called macros because a big block of code can be expanded from a small sequence of characters.

VBA Macros

Over the coming weeks I will be running through the creation of VBA Macros in Excel mostly and also in PowerPoint.  Later posts on VBA with Word and Outlook may follow.

Later this week, starting with Excel, we will record our first macro, break it down and change it through code, then I will include useful code snippets (pieces of code that can be reused over and over again to speed up writing your macros).

Before you know it, you could be writing code to speed up, improve and automate some of your tasks!