Book Image

VBA Automation for Excel 2019 Cookbook

By : Mike Van Niekerk
Book Image

VBA Automation for Excel 2019 Cookbook

By: Mike Van Niekerk

Overview of this book

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a programming language developed by Microsoft to automate tasks in MS Office applications. This book will help you to focus on the essential aspects of your role by automating mundane tasks in Excel and other Office applications. With comprehensive coverage of VBA delivered in the form of practice problems and bite-sized recipes, this book will help you to hit the ground running. Unlike most books that assume prior programming experience, this book starts with the fundamentals and gradually progresses to solving bigger problems. You’ll start by becoming familiar with VBA so that you can start recording macros right away. With this foundation in place, you’ll advance to using the full capabilities of the language as you apply loops, functions, and custom dialog boxes to design your own automation programs. You'll also get to grips with embedded macros and other advanced tools to enhance productivity and explore topics relating to app performance and security. Throughout this VBA book, you’ll cover multiple practice projects in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint while exploring tips and best practices to hone your skills. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed the skills you need to use VBA to create your own programs that control MS Office applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Chapter 16: Creating Custom Functions

Chapter 8, Using Functions, covered the basic principles of functions. In this chapter, we will take it to a different level altogether.

By definition, functions only return values, as you may know by now. What might surprise you is that Excel already has approximately 470 built-in functions.

Generally speaking, we hardly use more than 10 Excel functions at any given time. Granted, some advanced or specialist users may need more than that to get their work done, but even they would hardly utilize more than 25% of the total functions available.

If this is the case, then why would we go to the trouble of creating extra functions? The short answer is automation and increased productivity. Instead of building highly complex nested functions from scratch every time the need arises, you can embed and save the entire group of arguments as a single custom function. Imagine how much time you'll save for yourself!

In this chapter, we will...