New Training: Introduction to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

In this 8-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Ben Finkel covers how to use VBA to turn Microsoft Access into a full-fledge app development platform.

Learn programming basics including variables, functions, loops, and conditionals. Watch this new Microsoft 365,Microsoft Office training.

Watch the full course: Microsoft Access 2019 Training

This training includes:

• 8 videos

• 45 minutes of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Introduction to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

• Creating VBA Modules

• Subroutines and Functions

• Storing Information in Variables

• Changing Variables with Operators

• Passing Variables with Parameters

• Implementing VBA Code in a Form

• VBA Topics to Research Next

What You Can Do With Visual Basic for Applications, and One Thing You Definitely Shouldn’t

Visual Basic for Applications might sound familiar. There are some of us who grew up in middle school and high school with Visual Basic as one of the underlying programming essentials for Windows machines. Microsoft deemed it legacy in 2008, but now there’s Visual Basic for Applications, which allows you to create macros for Microsoft Office tools.

A macro (short for macroinstruction) takes a repetitive process and runs it as fast as the computer is able to. This can be something as simple as creating a chart out of a table of data, but it can also be complicated like running the different outcomes for how long it would take for an investment to reach $1 million with multiple variables like initial deposit, interest rate, years of investment, and more.

And it would be really inappropriate to do something like this, but you could also — theoretically — write a special sort of macro for Excel. The spreadsheet would have a bunch of data and tables in it when you gave it to someone. But you might not mention that after 15 clicks of the mouse, a pop-up window will ask if they’re sure they want to delete the file, and then no matter what they do it will self-destruct and save over itself. From office pranks to complicated computations, VBA is a powerful tool to know.