Programming Excel with VBA: A Practical Real-World Guide

Book Preface

This book was created to teach you how to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to automate worksheet applications.

It is a code book that was written to teach everyone, including people with zero experience in programming and people with decent programming knowledge, how to use and apply programming techniques to better interact with the users of your Microsoft Excel solutions in a more professional way.

It uses some ready-made worksheet applications as practical examples of how you can produce solid, precise, and reliable worksheet applications based on VBA programming. First I’ll introduce you to the VBA environment and the language structure and show you some basic examples that will take you on a consistent journey through the Excel object model. All the proposed examples use VBA to teach you how to interact with the Excel object model and its many properties, methods, and events.

As a basic strategy to teaching Excel VBA programming, this book uses the VBA Immediate window to first test each proposed Excel feature before showing how to use it in a code procedure. It is full of programming examples whose complexity grows from the book’s beginning to its end. This means it was written to be read one chapter at a time, with each chapter using the knowledge of previous chapters to provide a jump on your programmer skills.

My teaching strategy is to show a UserForm interface or code procedure step-by-step and to comment on all its instructions, one at a time, to give you a better understanding of how the VBA code can use good programming techniques to produce the desired result, with clear, concise, and reusable code.