© 2007 The Smart Method Ltd

71

Session Four: An

Introduction To VBA

Visual Basic is the most widely used language in the world for building

business applications.

Neil Innes assertion works fine with Visual Basic. It really does only take

two hours to learn all you need to know to write solid, professional code.

We used to teach the entire VBA language in one session but after years

of running our VBA courses in both Excel and Access flavours, decided

that this was too ambitious.

This session will get you started in VBA. The code you’ll write won’t be

professional grade yet but you’ll be well versed in the basics and be able

to write some elementary code. We’ll also introduce the debug tools in

this session. It may seem odd to learn debug tools before you’ve even

understood the language but you’ll find them very useful as you learn

more advanced language elements.

The session that follows this one (“Professional Grade VBA") will build

upon the basic skills learned in this session and add some vital

techniques to make your code professional and robust. This will allow

you to begin to do some really useful things with VBA.

Session Objectives

By the end of this session you will be able to:

Understand subs

Step through code

Understand stepover, step into and step out

Understand variables

Use the immediate window to view and change variable contents

Use the locals window to view and change variable contents

When I was a kid in school, I learned to read and write

And every morning in the hall, we sang with all our might

School days are happy days but then you have to go

And it only takes two hours to put down all you need to know.

Children’s Song by Neil Innes

Session4

4