Excel's Formula - sisman

Introducing VBA
In This Chapter
● An introduction to Visual Basic for Applications (Excel’s programming language)
● How to use the Visual Basic Editor
● How to work in the code windows of the Visual Basic Editor
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This chapter introduces you to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). VBA is Excel’s programming
language, and it is used to create custom worksheet functions. Before you can create custom
functions by using VBA, you need to have some basic background knowledge of VBA as well as
some familiarity with the Visual Basic Editor.
About VBA
VBA is best thought of as Microsoft’s common application scripting language. VBA is included
with most Office applications, and it’s also available in applications from other vendors. In Excel,
VBA has two primary uses:
Automating spreadsheet tasks
Creating custom functions that you can use in your worksheet formulas
Excel also includes another way of creating custom functions by using the XLM macro
language. XLM is pretty much obsolete, but it is still supported for compatibility purposes.
This book completely ignores the XLM language and focuses on VBA. By the
way, the XLM macro language has absolutely nothing to do with XML, which is a markup
language for storing structured data.
VBA is a complex topic — far too complex to be covered completely in this book. Because this
book deals with formulas, I hone in on one important (and useful) aspect of VBA — creating custom
worksheet functions. You can use a custom worksheet function (sometimes known as a userdefined
function) in formulas.