What is Excel VBA ?
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a computer programming language developed and owned by Microsoft. VBA is used to automate tasks and perform several other functions beyond creating and organizing spreadsheets.
VBA is a powerful and sophisticated built-in programming language that allows you to write your own functions or commands in an Excel spreadsheet.
In most simple terms you can also say that, VBA is the language of Office Applications like Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc. understand. So, all the programming that we are going to do in Excel or in other office application has to be done in VBA.
History of VBA and Versions.
VBA was first launched with MS Excel 5.0 in 1993. It became an instant success among developers to create corporate solutions using Excel. Inclusion of VBA with Microsoft Project, Access and Word replacing Access BASIC and Word BASIC respectively made it more popular.
It is an event driven programming language. It is developed by Microsoft in 1993 and stable released in Graffiti 2000 S.r.L. provides an integrated development environment (IDE).
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), is used as a macro or scripting language within several Microsoft applications, including Microsoft Office.
It is now used with Microsoft office applications such as MS-Excel, MS-Word and MS-Access. Visual Basic for Applications enables building user-defined functions (UDFs), accessing Windows API and other high-level functionality through dynamic-link libraries (DLLs).
Uses of VBA
VBA is used to automate tasks and perform several other functions beyond creating and organizing spreadsheets. For example, users require to automate some aspects of Excel, such as repetitive tasks, frequent tasks, generating reports.
Note:-
- You can automate the tasks that you have to do frequently.
- You can create a custom command in excel.
- You can repeat a set of instructions multiple times.
- You can create custom function popularly called as User Defined Function (UDF)
- You can create a custom add in in Excel.
Why learning VBA is so important?
As you become familiar with Excel, you will notice that although Excel provides you large number of tools, but still it doesn’t have everything that you need to perform your daily tasks. Such tasks may include creating custom functions, repetitive instructions, automating tasks etc.
And hence Microsoft has provided VBA as a gap filler; that allows users to write their own methods or commands to perform their tasks.
Is there any difference between a VBA Program and Macro?
A Macro language is very much different from a VBA. Macros were used with the older versions of office applications and they could only be used for automating instructions.