Difference between revisions of "Visual Basic for Applications"

Revision as of 08:41, 17 September 2015

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language, Visual Basic 6, and its associated integrated development environment (IDE).

Description

Visual Basic for Applications enables building user-defined functions (UDFs), automating processes and accessing Windows API and other low-level functionality through dynamic-link libraries (DLLs).

It can be used to control many aspects of the host application, including manipulating user interface features, such as menus and toolbars, and working with custom user forms or dialog boxes.

Visual Basic

As its name suggests, VBA is closely related to Visual Basic and uses the Visual Basic Runtime Library, but it can normally only run code within a host application rather than as a standalone program.

It can, however, be used to control one application from another via OLE Automation.

For example, it is used to automatically create a Word report from Excel data, which are automatically collected by Excel from polled observation sensors.

DLLs and class modules

VBA has the ability to use (but not create) (ActiveX/COM) DLLs, and later versions add support for class modules.

Built into Microsoft Office applications

VBA is built into most Microsoft Office applications, including Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Word.

See also

• Visual Basic for Applications examples

External links

• Visual Basic for Applications @ Wikipedia