What Is VBA?

Since Office 97, every version of Office has shipped with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a complete, integrated set of programming tools. VBA includes an editor for writing code, utilities for inspecting and importing external code libraries, and a language interpreter and debugger for running and testing the result.

The VBA environment evolved from older, less powerful tools (such as WordBasic and Excel’s macro language) for writing macros, small, specialized programs used to automate repetitive functions in an application. More recently, enterprise and vertical market developers have used VBA and Office to deliver organization-wide applications built on top of Office.

Although VBA ships with every copy of Office, its use is not confined to Office; other companies (such as Corel and Great Plains) have also incorporated it.

Why use VBA? VBA is attractive to developers because it lets them build solutions that draw on the huge base of functions already implemented in Office. For example, a solution that enables users to send helpdesk requests can use the message entry and send functions in Outlook to send requests and use the Access functions to store them. VBA programs running in an Office environment can perform most of the same operations that an Office user can. A VBA program, for instance, can create a new Excel spreadsheet, enter data into cells, and trigger a recalculation. Additionally, Office VBA programs piggy-back on the Office run-time environment, making it much simpler for developers to build applications, since the Office run time takes care of all operating system interactions.