What exactly is VBA?

[Mister_joe]

People,
Do not punch on the nose. VBA is turning out to be a mountain in front of me. The more I try to go deeper into it the more confusing it seems to be. I spent several hours today just to find out that a VBA Option Button control does not support the Checked property. I am still wondering why a VBA TextBox control has a Text property as well as a Value property. And also, that the well known PictureBox is not PictureBox in VBA. So, VBA is not VB? I am trying to programme Excel worksheet to have a custom user interface and to execute custom codes. I reckon that I will not go far in this task if I have to learn about a particular VBA control at the time I need it. Please, does anyone know a good book that explains VBA controls and syntaxes? I am not talking of Excel macros, I am talking of the underlying principles upon which Excel macros are written. If you assist in this, you would have contributed meaningfully in relieving me of some stress. Thank you sincerely.

[Jan Karel Pieterse]

Start out with one of the Dummies books on VBA. Then dive into more using e.g. Power programming by John Walkenbach. Then if you become a pro, purchase "Professional Excel Development" (version 2).
VBA is a subset of the old VB6 by Microsoft, so it is the VB.Net's predecessor.

[Mister_joe]

Thanks. The books I have on VBA all focus on Excel object model. There is little or nothing said about the few VBA controls.

[GTO]

For what it's worth, the macro recorder seems a great place to start. Record something you'd want to do, not too many steps of it at a time, then read through the help topics for what was recorded. Then when you start trimming the code (the recorder records most every step you take, and selecting/selection/activecell/etc. are rarely the best way), step thru it with the F8 button. When I started learning vba, I didn't even "get" what the Immediate window and Locals window would show me, but these are great tools to see what is happening. In conjunction with all this, surfing for answers at sites and googling will be a great boon as well. As you get into "jams", then do not hesitate to ask questions here, it's what the site is for :-)

Hope this helps,

Mark

[Mister_joe]

It does help. Thanks.

[GTO]

You are most welcome and Happy Coding!

[Aflatoon]

There is little or nothing said about the few VBA controls.

Technically, VBA does not have any controls because it is simply a language to be used within different applications, and has no UI of its own. The Forms library contains the familiar controls that you use on userforms (or embed as activex on worksheets if you're a masochist), so you may want to browse through that in the Object Browser.

[Mister_joe]

Thank you Sir.