Microsoft Visual Basic for Excel Course

Welcome to VBA for Excel. My name is Pravah Pugh; I am your instructor, and I will be taking you through from beginning to end in the course. This course covers all the fundamentals you'll need to know to use the VBA programming language as it applies to Excel. We will be starting off in the introduction chapter by looking at z demonstration of the macro and VBA capabilities, and we will be looking at the online help and how the best to access the information you need. Then we will be moving on to look in some depth at Macros, which I've called here 'the quick solution', because as you are probably aware, macros involve recording keystrokes, so the code, VBA code is written automatically by Excel. And you can go in then, make some changes, simplify code and we will show you some of those things. Then we will be moving on to the VBA programming language itself, so that you will be better able to edit macros if need be or indeed write code from scratch that goes beyond what a macro is capable of. And that task is assisted by using the VBA development environment, which is a very rich set of tools you can use to both write code and to troubleshoot it as you go along. This chapter, the VBA development environment chapter focuses more on the writing of code side of using the Visual Basic editor, and in the following chapter 'development and troubleshooting', we will be looking into those development and troubleshooting aspects of the Visual Basic editor. Following that, we will be moving on to have a look at functions, which is a key part of Excel functionality. And using VBA we can extend functions quite considerably by writing our own user-defined functions, and changing the categorization of functions, and using Excel's built-in functions within our own VBA code. Then it's on to 'code production and management'. As we start to build up our experience in writing code, we get to the situation where we, we want to better manage what we have, and use it to best advantage. So we will be looking at various different ways of doing that. Back to the worksheet again, and with a detailed look at cell referencing and in particular the range object and the selection object. And we will be looking at the various ways to identify ranges, return values, and just work with ranges and selections in general. This chapter also looks at labels and names, which is another important part of cell referencing. There's various ways that VBA can be used to control execution within Excel, and that's covered in the 'control structures' chapter. We will be looking at various ways of conditional execution of statements, using If statements and select case, and we will be looking at very various looping control structures - the for next loop, the for each next loop, and do loops. Finally, we will be concluding the course with a look at interacting with users, and in particular the message box and the input box. And how we can protect users from themselves, by using some of the application object's properties to prevent code execution being terminated unnecessarily by the user, or with the user seeing things that don't concern them and so on. We will be just setting up the environment to work in the most efficient way possible. So sit back now with your cup of coffee, and get ready for the first lesson.