Vba For Dummies

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Excel VBA Programming?

I would like to learn Excel VBA programming. I am comfortable working with Excel ( I’m a secretary and I feel my excel knowledge/experience is better than the average secretary) however, I can’t seem to find any basic VBA guides online. Excel VBA Programming for Dummies was suggested to me (by a programmer) but I haven’t gotten it yet. I was wondering if there is any FREE internet tutorial or guide that would be good for a beginner. (the other stuff I have found online is for people already familiar with programming in general, and this is my first delve into programming)

I've been programming in Excel VBA since about 1997 when VBA was first installed in Excel. I've read VB6 books, VB.Net books and looked through tons of websites online.

If you're truly wanting to learn Excel VBA then don't try learning VB6, VB.Net or Basic. They are similar, but Excel VBA has its own little quirks that make things you lear in those books not relate all of the time. Plus, those books are harder to learn.

I hate to be one to give bad news, but you're not really going to find a good website on how to program in Excel VBA. You'll find web pages here and there that tell you how to do specific things where people have questions, but there is no website that really does a good job of teaching the fundamentals.

My best recommendation would be to buy either Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA or Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA. John Walkenbach is the author and he does a great job of explaining the fundamentals and teaching you what you need to know in the order you need to learn it.

He teaches you things you need to know like how different versions of Excel have different numbers of rows and columns and how you can write your coding to adjust for that. Another thing he teaches is how to write your code so that it is efficient. If I write a For Next loop, it doesn't make sense to have it loop through every cell on the worksheet to find the number of cells on that worksheet that have the name John in them. Instead, I can limit the loop to search through the UsedRange or box of used cells so that the macro finishes in much less time. Or I can transfer the data to an Array and search through the array to make it even faster yet.

Then you have stuff like looping through and deleting rows. Normally, everybody is used to going from top to bottom. But to delete rows you need to delete starting at the bottom of the worksheet and work your way towards the top. This is because the rows move up when you delete a row. Then when your macro goes through its next loop you skip over a row if you delete from top to bottom instead of from bottom to top.

I tried teaching myself from the programming books and the web for almost 8-10 before I got his book. I learned more in a month or two from his book on VBA than I did in several years through the other methods.

Spend the money. It's worth getting his book. I looked on www.directtextbook.com and you can get the 2003 version new for $22.97 or the 2007 new for $25.92. Compare that with the hours you'll waste trying the other methods and its well worth every penny.

How to Record a Macro in Excel 2007 For Dummies


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