Advice for a newbie

[DavidObeid]

Hi,

I discovered www.exceltip.com by accident a few weeks ago and have
improved in my work on excel a zillion %. Thanks a heap.

My question is about learning VBA from scratch.

I (used to) know Pascal reasonably well and understand the basic
principles of programming.

What I want to know is where can I go to learn VBA for Excel so that I
can do even more with Excel? I have a few ideas for different programs,
but I am getting bogged down trying to work out details like syntax
etc.

Is there a "Programming in VBA for Excel for dummies" type book out
there? Is it possilbe that someone here has a URL with the basics on
it? (I don't just want examples, I would like something that explained
some of the theory behind the examples).

Thanks in advance for your help.

Dave

 

[NICK]

there is a Dummies Guide for Excel VBA and it by a guy
called John Walkenback and he has a great website at www.j-
walk.com

thx
nick

 

[Larry Daugherty]

Hi Dave,

The first thing to bear in mind is that VBA is a language that cuts across Visual Basic, all of the MS Office applications and an ever widening universe of 3rd party applications. That means that you'll always be using VBA to make some specific application do what you want. Each target application will have its own object model. For what it's worth, my experience has been that for each generation of MS Office, Excel is the most complete and robust (I work mostly with Access!). Once you've mastered VBA you can quickly program in lots of applications by learning their object models. Another powerful aspect is Automation whereby you control one application from another.

For things to do with Excel, John Walkenbach is one of the best guides. He has a few books listed on his site and you can probably get most of them from Barnes & Noble, Borders and Amazon. I don't know about the "Dummies" book but the ones I've bought have had companion disks/CDs with sample code and his PUP utilities. They're extremely useful. John also hangs around this newsgroup and a few other Excel related ngs. You can also buy the PUP source code for some advanced VBA and Excel programming.

For VBA knowledge, I recommend The VBA Developer's Handbook by Ken Getz et alia. It comes with a CD with sample code for Excel and Visual Basic.

HTH