What is VBA?
Posted on 03. Mar, 2012 by admin in Microsoft Excel
What is VBA?
VBA stands for Visual Basic for Applications. VBA is an event-driven programming language that is proprietary to Microsoft and it is built into most Microsft Office applications including Excel, Word, Access, and Outlook.
What Can It Do?
VBA can allow you to do a lot of things. Anything that you do in Excel can be automated in Excel. I’ve personally taken reports that used to take a co-worker 4 HOURS to do every single night and automated it completely. After writing the VBA code that automated it all I had to do was download the data from the database into Excel, save that data on my Desktop and wait. The report was timed to go off every day, it would grab the data it needed, run formulas, format the data correctly, save the workbook with that day’s date, and email out the report all for me without me having to do anything. It was great!
VBA is some powerful stuff that can allow you to set it up so you have to do the bare minimum and still get your work done.
What are the drawbacks?
I’m not a computer science major, so I’m sure there are some specific drawbacks when it comes to this coding language in terms of the computer. From my point of view the only drawback that I have seen is that it is a clunky code that can take up a lot of memory. If you have it doing a lot of complicated actions or formulas it can take up a lot of your computer’s RAM and CPU. However, if you just have it doing simple functions or one thing at a time you can run your VBA macros while doing other, productive of course, things.
