Datasheet

Chapter 1: What Is VBA?

VBA advantages

You can automate almost anything you do in Excel. To do so, you write

instructions that Excel carries out. Automating a task by using VBA offers

several advantages:

✓ Excel always executes the task in exactly the same way. (In most cases,

consistency is a good thing.)

✓ Excel performs the task much faster than you can do it manually (unless,

of course, you’re Clark Kent).

✓ If you’re a good macro programmer, Excel always performs the task

without errors (which probably can’t be said about you or me).

✓ If you set things up properly, someone who doesn’t know anything

about Excel can perform the task.

✓ You can do things in Excel that are otherwise impossible — which can

make you a very popular person around the office.

✓ For long, time-consuming tasks, you don’t have to sit in front of your

computer and get bored. Excel does the work, while you hang out at the

water cooler.

VBA disadvantages

It’s only fair that I give equal time to listing the disadvantages (or potential

disadvantages) of VBA:

✓ You have to know how to write programs in VBA (but that’s why you

bought this book, right?). Fortunately, it’s not as difficult as you might

expect.

✓ Other people who need to use your VBA programs must have their own

copies of Excel. It would be nice if you could press a button that trans-

forms your Excel/VBA application into a stand-alone program, but that

isn’t possible (and probably never will be).

✓ Sometimes, things go wrong. In other words, you can’t blindly assume

that your VBA program will always work correctly under all circum-

stances. Welcome to the world of debugging and, if others are using

your macros, technical support.

✓ VBA is a moving target. As you know, Microsoft is continually upgrad-

ing Excel. Even though Microsoft puts great effort into compatibility

between versions, you may discover that VBA code you’ve written

doesn’t work properly with older versions or with a future version of

Excel.

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