Chapter 26: Automating Project 2002 with VBA

Overview

Automation has always been the great promise of the computer age—get more work done, or lounge in your recliner as the computer toils away at repetitive tasks. To have your computer perform a series of actions at the click of a button, you need to tell the computer what to do in words that it understands. What if your company has a need for a specialized contact sheet, wants to speed up the budget approval system, or has to collect disparate versions of a Word document and create a report on the changes as quickly as possible? Unfortunately, you can’t simply tell your computer to “go do” these things, as you would tell a human assistant. You need to write a computer program using the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language. This chapter covers the following programming-related topics:

• What is Visual Basic?

• Understanding the VB Editor

• Writing programs with VBA

• Understanding parts and functions of VBA code

• Working with VBA operators and programming structures

• Using message boxes and input boxes