Chapter 1

Microsoft Office/Visual Basic for Applications Overview

Microsoft Office allows people to create, organize, communicate, and collaborate on ideas and information, serving a wide range of customers from the desktop to the World Wide Web. To allow developers to extend how people work with information, Office includes the built-in programming language Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA.

Visual Basic for Applications provides a programming environment and a language for you to build custom programs that extend Office's capabilities, integrate Office with other software applications, and incorporate Office into a set of business processes. Building custom programs with Visual Basic for Applications lets you take full advantage of the functionality and services provided by Office applications.

To help you develop custom programs with Office, this book provides information for the following types of developers:

Because developers often write and segment programming code based on specific tasks, code samples and descriptions in this book are organized by task rather than by application. Throughout this book, you'll find side-by-side comparisons of tasks such as saving a document or determining the current selection, so that you'll learn how to write code to accomplish the same task in more than one Office application.