Tuesday, December 20, 2016

What is VBA ?

VBA stands for Visual Basic for Applications. It is a programming language provided by Microsoft, to create applications or develop macros. VBA is a free tool, which comes along with the Microsoft office package, which we can use to develop programs in Excel, Word or PowerPoint platform.

Here VBA is widely used with Excel to create macros to automate the repetitive tasks. Tasks which consumes lot of manual efforts, which can be automated using the VBA macro. We can write a set of instructions in VBA code to execute the repetitive tasks, fast and more accurately without any manual intervention. Few people also call these macros as Robots. which do their tasks without resting and they can rest for the time the robot is doing their job :-).

Please note that VBA and VB are different from each other. By using VB (Visual Basic), you can create applications which are standalone and executable. While VBA needs support of Microsoft office applications to develop and run macros.

Excel from Microsoft office is widely used across globe, from day to day tasks to complex data processing. To execute these tasks using the macro (vba code), we can execute many manual tasks such as:


  1. Formatting the data in specific formats for all sheets in workbook
    -formatting your monthly reports for specific format and arrangement of the data for presentation purpose. Creating charts and formatting colors as per the report requirements. This can be done by writing set of instructions and executing them with click of a button.
  2. Automating the repetitive task
    -If you need to collate data from 20 different excel files on daily basis and put it in a template file. Then format this data as per required output. This task can be automated by the macro. For the first time you can record the macro while collating the data, The next time you would just need to execute the macro with one click and all the manual work will be completed by the automated instructions.
  3. Inserting frequently used text
    -Say while preparing reports, you need to insert few texts in a standard format for all reports you create, Here we can write macro and assign a shortcut button for it, by pressing which the macro will insert the required text for you. e.g. The product description headers. This will reduce your typing or copy paste time and eliminate the error of manual mistake.
  4. Creating complete vba application
    -To create a complete vba application would definitely take some time to understand the coding and input requirements. e.g. you can develop a complete conference room manager application using Excel VBA code, which can be used by the users to book an conference room.
  5. Creating custom functions in VBA
    - Apart from the standard functions (sum, count and more) available in Excel, we can create custom functions as per our requirements, very easily using the VBA code. e.g. say we are creating a home loan emi calculator, we can create a functions which will give us the output, based on few inputs for calculations.
There is a large scope of developing macros, automating the complex processes, generating reports and much more. It all depends on how creative you think to solve the problems. That's all for now, about VBA.

Thank you for reading.

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