Introduction to VBA

Visual Basic for Applications is a programming language that contains elements of object-oriented programming (OOP). Despite other writings to the contrary, it is not a full-fledged OOP environment. While it is beyond the scope of this book to get into all the details of an OOP environment, VBA is lacking in several important components.

VBA is a language that is closely tied to the Microsoft Windows environment and the programming backbone of the Microsoft Office environment. Like many other programming languages, it is event driven (the concept of an event was introduced in Chapter 3). In other words, it is waiting for something to happen. The event could be a mouse click, a keypress, a form opening, and so on. When an event happens, VBA calls upon Windows’ ability to handle it. As we will be seeing, this has the potential of saving the programmer a lot of work.

History of VBA

Visual Basic, which is the basis for VBA, evolved from a language called BASIC, which stands for Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. In many ways, it was an answer to FORTRAN and COBOL, which were very difficult to use and required a great deal of training.

Many members of the academic community felt that something simpler was needed for students to get a grip on programming. Also, BASIC could be run on a computer without huge resources.

All this happened in the 1960s. If we fast-forward to 1982, we see the release of the personal computer (PC) by IBM. The operating system behind this new technology was DOS (Disk Operating System). BASIC was shipped as part of it (actually, it was a version called GW-BASIC). It was not overly popular and had limited use.

Several years later, Microsoft elevated the language with the release of Microsoft Visual Basic. This allowed developers to program visually by using a lot of drag-and- drop techniques as well as selecting options from a property sheet.

A short time later, Microsoft introduced a special version of Visual Basic called VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). This version had a lot of tools that allowed it to work in the Microsoft Office environment. However, it did not have a lot of the GUI tools and controls found in the full version of Visual Basic.