Chapter 1: Introduction toVBA for Applications

Overview

In 1992 a good friend of mine said to me that this new database package, Microsoft Access version 1.0, is never going to last. He felt that it was not a strong enough contender considering the competition that was then available.

Here we are, 12 years later, and evidence strongly shows that my friend was quite wrong. Not only has Access lasted, but it is now serving as the backbone for many large web sites. It has successfully combined a powerful database engine with an interface that is friendly for even the first-time user. In many respects, it now rivals Microsoft’s enterprise SQL Server database environment.

With Microsoft Access, you can accomplish a lot without any programming skills whatsoever. However, with a knowledge of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), you can do a tremendous amount of customization, as well as address a large number of scenarios.

In this chapter, we are going to take a brief excursion into the history of Access. We are then going to examine the Access environment by looking at how to create the various objects that make up a database. We are going to take our first brief look at the Visual Basic Editor (VBE).

Since we are looking at the history of Access in this chapter, we will conclude by gazing, briefly, into a crystal ball and taking a guess as to where Microsoft may be going in the future.