Program by Levels

Discovering VBA for Excel (Macros)
A Tutorial

In earlier days they were called MACROS (macro commands). You would assemble a series of keystrokes and Excel would learn and do it for you. It saved time and it saved money. Behind the scene these macros were automatically built using a programming language called VBA (Visual Basic for Application). You can still learn very rapidly how to develop such useful tools using the Macro Recorder. But now you can also go behind the scene yourself and develop very powerful programs within Excel using VBA the easy to learn programming language.

The capacity of the computer on your desk and its memory have increased 1,000 folds in the last 10 years and this personal computer of yours is now part of a network within your company and, this network connects you to the world through the Web. This is why VBA for Excel is now used as a full fledged programming language with which you can develop complex and powerful programs within Excel. These applications can be stand-alone's or back-ends and front-ends to central databases, accounting, sales and manufacturing programs. You can now do things with Excel that were impossible even 5 years ago.

VBA is a programming language for users who want to make things happen by themselves without waiting for overworked IT people. VBA is a programming language that can be mastered by anybody even without any programming background.

There are more than 1,000,000 words in English and you use a few thousands daily. To become an advanced user or consultant in VBA for Excel you need to learn about 150 VBA words. Add 50 more to work with userforms and the rest will be written for you by the Macro Recorder.

VBA for Excel allows you to develop the tools that you need at a cost substantially lower than any other programming language . Because you develop them yourself or because you are an important actor in the development process the output is EXACTLY what you need.

Enslave the technology instead of being enslaved by it.

Where does VBA come from?

In the '70's a new computer language appeared called Basic. Some of you used it on advanced calculators (TI 59) and on old COCO64 from Radio Shack. At the time, RAM (memory) and CPU's (the brain of the computer) were very, very small and there were limits to what you could do with the language.

With today's computers came Visual Basic (VB). It is still Basic but a lot of elements are pre-programmed making the user's task much simpler. Microsoft adopted the language and introduced it as a component of all its applications.

Should you learn VBA or VB?

Let's say that VB is for programmers and VBA is for users (or developers). If you are not a programmer adopt VBA for Excel because most of the functions that are needed to organize and analyze business data are pre-programmed in Excel. It costs a lot less to develop financial and management applications in Excel than to re-invent the wheel and do everything in VB.

What is the difference between VB, VBA for Excel, VBA for Access, VBA for Word, VBA for Project, etc?

To answer this question I will ask you to imagine a meeting of five English speaking persons, a lawyer, an accountant, a physician, a chemist and a psychologist. They all speak English but when it is time to talk about their work none of them totally understand the other. It is the same with VB and VBA's. The objects that you will work with vary from one sub-language to the other. For examples there are cells, worksheets and formulas in Excel but there are none of these things in Word or Power Point.

But basically if you speak English you can easily learn VB or any of the VBA's.

VBA for Excel is the most user friendly of the VBA's because of the macro recorder that can write the code for you and because you can test your VBA procedures (macros) step by step while seeing them at work directly in your workbook. During the test you can modify things, go back a few lines and re-test them. Not only the language is easy but the programming tools are very user friendly.

Who are these 33 lessons for?

The tutorial developed by excel-vba.com has been designed for accountants, productions planners, production supervisors, sales people, financial analysts and other business data analysts with no or little background in programming. There are very few books on VBA and they are all written by computer geeks who don't really understand the needs of real people.  

VBA is a programming language for users. It is simple and easy to learn. Anybody can develop simple macros (VBA procedures) and with time and interest you can get to a point where you can develop very complex procedures to accomplish very sophisticated tasks.

There is no real pre-requisite before you start learning VBA for Excel but you can expect to develop much better applications if you:

- know your data well (finance, accounting, sales, marketing, inventory, production, etc.) and
- know about the most powerful tools in Excel: SUMPRODUCT, INDEX/MATCH and the Excel database functionalities. No need to learn about very rarely used functionalities like pivot tables, solver, goal seek, scenarios, group, outline  and other specialized tools.

If you have more that 10 years of experience in your field of expertise (Accounting, Finance, Production, Engineering, etc..) you may want to learn VBA to become an Excel VBA Developer (the market and the money are  very good). Or you might want to learn VBA to automate some of your repetitive tasks that are tedious and consume a lot your time. Once these tasks automated you can use the time to do what you are good at which is analyzing your data.

About the tutorial

The tutorial comprises 33 lessons and is divided in 3 sections: the programming environment, the code and the useforms.

There are four ways to navigate on screen around the tutorial that will be installed on your own computer.

1- If purchase it to learn from scratch follow the steps for: beginners, intermediate and advanced.

2- If you quite experienced and use the tutorial as reference you  can use the quick links, a list of all the lessons.

3- If your are searching for something in particular you can use the search by keyword page.

4- Finally if you want to know what is in the tutorial see the complete table of contents or the tables of contents by section: the programming environment, the code and the useforms.

Whatever you need is in this tutorial and the other 80% of VBA that you don't need is not adding useless pages to the tutorial making what is important as hard to find as a needle in a hay stack.

The Tutorial on VBA for Excel (macros)
VBA for Excel is the programming language within Microsoft Excel

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