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Wise Owl Training Blogs Introduction to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) Writing VBA Code (Visual Basic for Applciations)

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say thanks you can click here to make a Introduction to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
contribution. Thanks for looking at our
blogs! Part three of a five-part series of blogs

BLOGS BY TOPIC If you've heard people in your office talking about macros or VBA but
don't understand what they mean, this blog series will make everything
Blog home page (346) clear. It's an introduction to the most basic skills you'll need to start
Excel + (122) creating your own programs in any of the Microsoft Office applications.
SQL Server (148)
1. Introduction to VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)
Programming (138)
2. Creating Your First VBA Program
General (22)
3. Writing VBA Code (Visual Basic for Applciations) (this blog)
Archived (70)
4. Running a Subroutine in VBA macros
5. Problems When Running VBA Code
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 BLOGS BY AUTHOR

Andrew Gould (81) Posted by Andrew Gouldon 01 July 2011

Andy Brown (249)
David Wakefield (3)
Jenny Brown (1)
Michael Allsop (12)

BLOGS BY YEAR

2010 (2)
2011 (76)
2012 (100)
Writing VBA Code
2013 (45) If you've been following this blog series so far you should have a newly
created subroutine with a flashing text cursor poised and ready to write some
2014 (38)
real code. This article will explain some of the basic rules of writing VBA and
2015 (23) show you a couple of tricks to get you creating code as quickly as possible.
2016 (52)
2017 (10)

The Basic Grammar of VBA

VBA is a language, and like any language it has grammatical rules that you
need to follow if you want to make sense when you're "speaking" it. Generally
when you're writing VBA programs, most of the time you'll be attempting to
perform some kind of action on some sort of object. The structure of a line of
code that performs an action on an object is very consistent in VBA - you
always start the sentence by referring to the thing you want to do something
to, followed by the action you want to perform, and you use a full stop to
separate the two. So, very generally speaking, a basic sentence in VBA would
look like this:
Thing.Action

In VBA terms, the Thing part of the above sentence would technically be
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 called either a collection or an object. The Action part of the sentence would
be referred to as a method. So, the technical way of representing the above
sentence would look like this:
Object.Method
or
Collection.Method

Bearing this in mind, we're going to write a line of code that will apply theAdd
method to the Workbooks collection.

Writing Your First Line of Code

In our first line of code, the collection part of the sentence is the word
Workbooks. Workbooks is the name for the collection of all of the currently
open Excel files. Type it into your code and follow it immediately with a full
stop.

Typing in a full stop after a

word that VBA recognises
presents you with a list of
other words you can use
to finish the sentence.

After typing in the full stop you should see a list of keywords appear
automatically. This feature is referred to as Intellisense - horrible name, useful
feature! The next section describes several ways to use Intellisense to save
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 you as much typing as possible.

Using Intellisense to Complete a Sentence

After the Intellisense list appears we can complete our sentence in a number
of ways. The method part of our line of code is the word Add - to get this
word into your code you could do any of the following:

Option Effect

The word is typed in and the

Type the word manually.
cursor stays at the end of the line.

The word is inserted

Use the mouse to scroll to the word you automatically and the cursor
want and double-click on it. appears immediately after the
word.

The word is inserted

Use the arrow keys or start typing the first
automatically and the cursor
letters of the word to highlight it in the list,
appears immediately after the
then press Tab on the keyboard.
word.

The word is inserted

Use the arrow keys or start typing the first
automatically and the cursor
letters of the word to highlight it in the list,
appears on a new line below the
then press Enter on the keyboard.
previous one.

Probably the quickest technique to use in this example is to type in the letter
A which will automatically select the word Add in the list, and then press
Enter .

Congratulations, you've
finally written your first line

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 of code! When we get
around to running our
subroutine, this line will
create a new workbook.

Adding items to a collection is a standard way to create

new objects in VBA. The screenshots below show
examples of doing this in Word and PowerPoint.

In Word, the collection of open files is called Documents.

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 In PowerPoint, the collection of open files is called Presentations.

Changing Things in VBA by Using Properties

So far we've seen how to create a new workbook in Excel VBA by applying the
Add method to the Workbooks collection. Now that we've done this we need
to add some text to some of the cells in the file that we've just created. We're
going to do this by modifying aproperty of an object. Properties are like
methods in that they always appear after the object or collection in a VBA
sentence. Unlike methods, you can assign a value to a property to change it
in some way. The basic grammar of a line of code to do this would look like
this:
Object.Property = SomeValue
or
Collection.Property = SomeValue

The object we are interested in is a cell, which is referred to as aRange in

Excel VBA, and the property we want to change is calledValue. Type the
following into your code:

You can identify

the properties in
the list by their
"finger pointing
at a piece of
paper" symbol.

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 Referring to a Range object is slightly more complicated than referring to the
Workbooks collection because we have to say which cell we are interested in.
We do this by typing a cell reference (here it isA1) inside a set of round
brackets and double-quotes. Next, we can type in a full stop to display the list
of properties and methods.
The quickest way to select the Value property from the list is to do the
following:
1. Type in the letter V to jump to the word Validation.
2. Press the down arrow key on the keyboard to select Value.
3. Press Tab .

This should leave you with a subroutine looking like this:

The only remaining thing

is to say what we want to
change the value of the
cell to.

We can now say what text we want to appear in the cell. To do this we need
to type in an equals sign, = followed by the text. All literal text in VBA must
be enclosed in a set of double-quotes. Type in the following and press Enter
at the end of the line.

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 When you press Enter at the end of the line you should see a space
appear on either side of the equals sign.

As a final flourish in our very basic program, we're going to write a line that will
put today's date into another cell on the spreadsheet. This line will look very
similar to the one we've just created, so type in the following code. Try to
remember the quickest way to use the Intellisense list - hint: it doesn't involve
the mouse!

Press Enter at the end of the line and you should see the worddate
becomes capitalised.

Rather than putting in the date as a string of literal text, we've used a built-in
VBAfunction called Date. This function calculates what today's date is each
time the code is run (based on your computer's clock) and puts the result of
the calculation into the cell.

Working Out How to do Other Things

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 Although we've barely scratched the surface of what you can do with VBA,
you've learnt a couple of basic rules of grammar that will help you as you
learn how to do new things. One fairly good way to find out how to do other
things in VBA is to record a macro. Recording a macro means that you can
do a bunch of things in an Office application, formatting some cells in Excel for
instance, and have the application write out the VBA code for you as you are
doing it. This technique has some limitations, but it is a neat way to discover
new methods and properties.

Testing and Running a Subroutine

So you've written a program, but you don't have any idea if it's going to work!
The next article in this series shows you how to run a program from a
developer's point of view and explains a few useful techniques for letting other
people run the code you've written.

1. Introduction to VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)

2. Creating Your First VBA Program
3. Writing VBA Code (Visual Basic for Applciations) (this blog)
4. Running a Subroutine in VBA macros
5. Problems When Running VBA Code

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