Naming Conventions

VBA is not a case-sensitive language. However, in the real world, it is going to need to interact with case-sensitive languages. For that reason, naming standards have been adopted by the programming community to minimize the possible problems with the interaction. They are easy to remember:

• Everything in lowercase

• Midword capitalization

• No spaces

In programming terms, any name you assign to something (such as objects, variables, and so on) is called an identifier. Let’s say you want to use My Address Book as an identifier. Using the programming conventions, you would spell it like this: myAddressBook.

To help identify the type of object something is, you begin the object name with a three-letter prefix. Table 3-1 lists the prefixes used for Access objects.

Table 3-1: Object-Identifying Prefixes

Object	Prefix
Container	con
Document	doc
Field	fld
Form	frm
Group	grp
Index	idx
Macro	mac
Module	mod
Page	pag
Property	pty
Query	qry
Report	rpt
Table	tbl
User	usr

As an example, suppose you want to make myAddressBook a table. The naming convention would be tblMyAddressBook.

We will be working with these conventions all through the book.