MasterClass! - Microsoft Visual Basic for Word 2010 Course

In this lesson I'm going to talk about what this course will provide and what will you learn in this course. Now I'm sure many of you who are considering this course have some experience with Microsoft Word. You've used it to create it documents, maybe create letters to produce papers that are, are sent. In the use of your Microsoft Word you've likely done some slightly more advanced things like inserting tables or pictures or Clip Arts. Maybe even added some shapes to document say to draw illustrations, to demonstrate something or to illustrate something, some point that your trying to make. If you've written professional papers or term papers for school you may have used the Reference Options that are available. You've worked with customizing your own page headings and footers. You've done all sorts of things like that. This course isn't about the simple basic aspects of Word. It actually expects that you have become rather proficient with all of these different menu options on top and know how to use them to create standard documents. It also expects that most of you have had at least some experience with recording a macro and that may be where the interest in the subject matter of this course could lie. Many of you who have created macros may have thought well wouldn't it be nice to be able to have the macro do things differently based on different data items or different circumstances. Because you know with the macro when you record it, you're also recording exactly what is typed. So if you have to have the macro have a slight change. You have one of two options. Either create a different macro which is almost entirely similar just with a few changes or create a series of macros tied together sequentially like you do on macro. It prepares for some data, it would leave you at that point, you'd enter the specific data being asked and then the next macro would run and so forth. You might have to execute different macros in the middle of the sequence based on what was typed. But it requires you as the user to know which one to want. And you might have thought gee, wouldn't it be great if there was a simple way to automate this process for different kinds of macros or different kinds of operations to be performed based on a value that's entered or based on a situation in the document. And that is what this course is about. It uses a language called Visual Basic for Applications that's created in this kind of Editor Window. This Visual Basic for Applications abbreviated VBA, this code runs in the background of Microsoft Word. You don't see it happening, you see the results of what the code is doing appear in the document but you don't actually see the code. But the code is set up so that it can do things like conditional processing, do slightly different operations based on the values of things. It can even stop execution, ask for input from the user and then continue on when that input is received. So this course allows you to create customized code to handle special situations. Using the different kinds of data objects created by Microsoft that represents the different parts of a document so that you can reference it in the background in the code. Without necessarily having to change it but if you do need to change it you can actually have the background VBA code make changes without you having to do it. Now there is a basic understanding of certain things that is expected for people taking this course. As I mentioned before we expect that you know quite a bit about the general options available in Microsoft Word and that you have used them in various documents. We also expect that you have a knowledge of the basic structure and syntax or keywords of the VBA language. This course will not teach you the Visual Basic for Applications language but instead how to use it in Microsoft Word documents. If you haven't used VBA before I highly recommend that you take the Visual Basic for Applications Introduction course that's available here at VTC and then when you've successfully completed that course. Come back and continue this one. Now one final thing that this course will provide that some of you may really, dearly love especially if you've done a lot with tables is it allows you to learn how to create things called templates and templates are at two levels. One is a template to define the basic structure of things you add like a table. So you could say a typical table I would add would have a certain number of rows and columns with this border, with this font for each of the cells of the table. You can define that, you can change that for a specific table but you can actually define that this is what I want to do for tables. You can also define template files. General information about Microsoft Word documents, the way you'd open it with the template file and have the different levels of headings, the main body font, the size, any background design or watermarks that you'd want on the document. You could even create your own logo for your own personal business and it's like creating your own stationery but you don't have to print anything out and go through the expense of photocopying it where you might lose resolution or the colors might turn at a little different. That stationery style would be saved as a template and then you would open your document and always have that logo, that style of stationery for use. You'll learn how to do those kinds of files as well in this course.