Rachel

I'm working on a large project for work using VBA in Excel, and never having used VB or VBA I'm look for some good resources that can take me from the very basics through some more complex features. I was just going to go to the bookstore and pick something up, but I'd like some suggestions before I spend my hard earned money on this.

Jinn

Are you suuuuuuuuuuuuure you have to use VBA? You might not've gotten any responses because I don't think I'm the only one who thinks VB is a joke of a language. There's not much "serious" programming done in VB; what do you need it to do?

Then again, I could be totally wrong..

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maleficent

VBA is Visual Basic for Applications - it's the macro language within Excel and Word...

To be honest, I've got a stack of macro reference guides from every version of Excel and/or Word since the beginning of time... they help a little bit - but your best reference is honestly what's available on the web - depending on what you want your code to do...


what version of excel are you working with and what do you want your code to do -

most fo the vba for excel reference guides are pretty good -you want a book that has a lot of examples in it (though exampels are usually easier found inthe web...)

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Rachel

I found some help on the web of examples and I think my difficulty is I'm trying to do something maybe a bit out of the scope of what VBA should be used for, or I just can't think "windows" very well.

The Project: Create an semi-automated data analysis tool to read in pre and post exposure datalogs (text files) from a number of (semiconductor product) testers (all in different formats) and apply some statistical analysis (which excel can do) to determine at what level of exposure parts began to fail.

So there already exists a VBA excel program that will read in a number of these datalog formats and my hopes were to use what is already written and just add on to it. Unfortunately the datalogs I'm working with right now are not covered by this already written tool. So I need to add them to the list of files that can be handled before I can begin with my part of the project, the statistical analysis.

In my minor programming experience (6 college classes) VBA really doesn't seem like the best way to do it, but sometime substantial is already started in it. I have no qualms about recoding this thing in another language, but all I've ever really used was C++, and for text handling it also doesn't seem the way to go. So, I feel a bit stuck.

SaltPork

The problem with VBA is that you need to know the Office app very well in order to use it effectively. Not knowing Excel inside and out will seriously handicap you. Not knowing VBA is less of an issue. With regard to JinnKai's snipe at VB being useless as a programming language, I would disagree. While building a full application with it is a pain in the ass due to DLL hell, it can do most things you want and hooks into the WinAPI quite nicely. That aside, if you know C++ then picking up the syntax of VB is very simple. The difficult part is pulling the files in and making them useful data-wise. Once you've tackled that you should be able to do what you need to with the data. The best way to handle text files in varying formats is generally brute force, you can do it elegantly, but it's a pain in the ass.

Not sure that any of that is helpful, but with the info you've given it's all I've got. One good piece of advice I can give you is to utilize the Microsoft newgroups for Excel VBA. That should be a huge help.

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It was like that when I got here....I swear.

shakran

http://www.utteraccess.com/


Those guys program in VBA all the time. They can help you do pretty much anything you want.

John Henry

Microsoft's own support is surprisingly helpful, both on msdn and within office itself. Although if you're searching msdn, I'd recommend using "site:msdn.microsoft.com" on Google, rather than trying to use the ghastly search engine on the website.

If it's excel automation you're wanting to find out about, one good starting point is to record a macro doing something similar to what you want to do. You can then see in the modules for that spreadsheet what the commands/objects/methods used are. Look those up in your microsoft excel help to find out the syntax etc and if it's not quite what you want, you'll probably find what you're looking for in the 'See Also' section. Simplistic and obvious, perhaps, but it seems to work.

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