VBA - Overview

VBA stands for Visual Basic for Applications an event-driven programming language from Microsoft that is now predominantly used with Microsoft office applications such as MS Excel, MS-Word, and MS-Access.

It helps techies to build customized applications and solutions to enhance the capabilities of those applications. The advantage of this facility is that you NEED NOT have visual basic installed on our PC, however, installing Office will implicitly help in achieving the purpose.

You can use VBA in all office versions, right from MS-Office 97 to MS-Office 2013 and also with any of the latest versions available. Among VBA, Excel VBA is the most popular. The advantage of using VBA is that you can build very powerful tools in MS Excel using linear programming.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding with this tutorial, you should install MS Office, particularly MS-Excel.

Application of VBA

You might wonder why to use VBA in Excel as MS-Excel itself provides loads of inbuilt functions. MS-Excel provides only basic inbuilt functions which might not be sufficient to perform complex calculations. Under such circumstances, VBA becomes the most obvious solution.

For example, it is very hard to calculate the monthly repayment of a loan using Excel's built-in formulas. Rather, it is easy to program a VBA for such a calculation.

Accessing VBA Editor

In Excel window, press "ALT+F11". A VBA window opens up as shown in the following screenshot.