VBA Primer
- 4/15/2011
Working with VBA: Next Steps
Once you’ve mastered the basics in this primer, you’re likely to find more complex VBA to be quite easy. And there are many online resources to help you progress.
The MSDN Office Developer Center (http://msdn.microsoft.com/office) is a fantastic resource for all things related to automating Microsoft Office. The majority of content on this site is for managed code (Microsoft Visual Studio) development (the platform often used by professional Microsoft Office developers), but far from all of it. You can find a growing number of resources on VBA as well as a volume of information on Office Open XML (which is addressed in Chapter 24).
The Office Developer Center also has a VBA-specific site that’s a fantastic online home base for learning about VBA. And it has one of my all-time favorite friendly URLs: http://iheartmacros.com.
In addition, when you don’t find the information you need in VBA help, search the MSDN library. The library’s resources are pretty amazing—I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned there: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library.
But in addition to general resources, there’s also more VBA topic-specific content that I’d like to point out. The online bonus content for this book includes a couple of VBA articles, and there are also a few articles available on the Office Developer Center that might be particularly handy for next steps with VBA.
The Immediate window in the Visual Basic Editor (discussed in the earlier sidebar “Do More Than You Might Imagine with One Line of Code” is one of my favorite tools, and by far one of the most valuable tools for using VBA to troubleshoot document formatting. Learn more about the Immediate window here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd535470.aspx.
Get tips on using VBA specifically to troubleshoot documents here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd630112.aspx.
Learn about controlling built-in Microsoft Office commands using VBA (including an introduction to using events) here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd627337.aspx.
See examples of how to use some of what you learned in this primer to format long documents more quickly and easily here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd554917.aspx.
Companion Content Find articles on how to create and use UserForms (dialog boxes) in VBA and how to manage VBA errors, as well as a list of all links provided in this chapter and others, in the online Bonus Content folder available online as part of the companion content for this book, at http://aka.ms/651999/files.
Before you go, however, the next (and final) chapter in this book provides a similar primer on the basics of using the Office Open XML Formats to edit documents and create custom content.