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)

Understanding and identifying objects in VBA

In this recipe, we will learn how to identify objects. Whether you record a macro or manually enter code, you will be working with objects. In essence, the Excel object model is a hierarchy of objects contained in Excel. Each object has certain properties and can be manipulated to perform certain actions in Excel.

Once you understand this hierarchical structure, you will have a good understanding of object-oriented programming (OOP).

Getting ready

As long as you have Excel installed on your system, you have everything you need. You may not have been aware of it, but every time you've used Excel in the past, you've been using objects.

How to do it…

The steps for this recipe are as follows:

  1. Open a blank workbook in Excel. The first object we're looking at here is the application itself. That's the familiar Excel interface we deal with every time we work in Excel.
  2. Next, contained in Excel...