Objective of This Book

The objective of this book is to first show you how VBA works in Excel and the basics of object-oriented programming. The intricacies of the VBA programming language are explained and specific keywords and functions are explained. It then takes you through a number of worked examples showing how to set up subroutines and functions. Full source code is shown for all examples. Finally, it shows you how to hook the subroutines onto the Excel menu system and how to turn a set of interrelated VBA macros into an Excel add-in package. (An add-in is a professional application that can be attached into Excel and that works independent of the workbooks that are loaded but provides extra functionality to Excel.)

The book shows you not only how to do things that are on the Excel spreadsheet menu but also how to do a number of things outside of Excel's menu structure ‚ and make them all look absolutely mind-blowing on a spreadsheet. People seeing them for the first time ‚ not knowing that they were done through VBA code ‚ will either be amazed and congratulate you on your knowledge, or quietly go away and study the menu structure to see if there is a way of doing this (which, of course, there is not). For example, Chapter 11 will show you how to set up your own menu structures within the Excel menu structure. Chapter 38 will show you how to completely change the appearance of comments in cells . The book is full of completed (you are walked through each step of what the code is doing) examples, which have all been tried and tested . There are also plenty of screenshots so that you can see what your code should be producing.

I have always learned programming by example and experimentation. If I can see the code written down and see what it produces, then I can examine how it works and learn from it. Even if the examples do not do exactly what you want, you'll be able to modify them to suit your own needs.

The book assumes that you already have a good working knowledge of Excel from the spreadsheet perspective, but have not dealt with writing macros beyond recording one. By the time you finish all the examples in this book, you will have a very good knowledge of how to use VBA to solve problems; the only limiting factor will be your imagination .