Visual Basic for Applications

For the emulator frequently nicknamed VBA, see VisualBoyAdvance.

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's Visual Basic which is built into all Microsoft Office applications, some other Microsoft applications such as Visio and is at least partially implemented in some other applications such as AutoCAD and WordPerfect. It supersedes and expands on the capabilities of earlier application-specific macro programming languages such as Word's WordBasic, and can be used to control almost all aspects of the host application, including manipulating user interface features such as menus and toolbars and working with custom user forms or dialog boxes.

As its name suggests, VBA is closely related to Visual Basic, but can normally only run code from within a host application rather than as a standalone application. It can however be used to control one application from another (for example automatically creating a Word report from Excel data).

VBA is functionally rich and extremely flexible but it does have some important limitations, including limited support for callback functions.

Literature

• Andreas Janka, VBA mit Word, Galileo Press, Bonn 2004, 965 Seiten, ISBN 3898424693 147 pages extract (2,55 MB) as PDF from the book VBA mit Word (non-English).

Examples

It is useful for automating database tasks such as transversing a database:

dim db as database

dim rs1 as recordset

set db = currentdb

set rs1 = db.openrecordset"select * from main"

with rs1

.movefirst

do while .EOF not true

msgbox !fieldname .movenext

loop

end with

External Links

• VBA Home on Microsoft