Comments on: How To: Use Someone Else’s Macro

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:42:04 +0000

Thanks for the pointers (no pun intended) Jon.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:51:53 +0000

Note to self: blog about how I got started with Excel programming.

Jorge – I’ve heard it said that laziness is the mother of all inventions, which may be true. I know for me, laziness is why I got started programming. Back in the old days of Excel 4, I had this technique I used to model material deformation behavior, and it required iteration between two Solver loops, one for loading and the other for unloading. You had to run alternative Solver simulations on each part until the difference between them was less than some small acceptable error, which meant probably a total of a dozen or so Solver loops, and you had th change all of the constraints and target cells and changing cells each time. Then repeat for a total of a dozen cases. So let’s say 144 Solver loops, each set up manually. This took more than half a day to do by hand, and it was tedious as hell, almost as tedious as this description. Anyway, I spent a couple weeks in Excel with the XLM manual in my lap, and I automated the sucker, and finally it ran in about two minutes. When I got Excel 97, this was my first VBA project, and it was hard, but I got the time down to ten or fifteen seconds. There was no turning back.

By: Jorge Camoes

Jorge Camoes — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:40:53 +0000

Jon, I believe Derek is the user Charley Kyd talks about…

Derek, believe me, I am not a programmer, and I don’t go much beyond the examples above, but once you start automating some tasks with recorded macros you will not turn back. There are many things that you simply can’t do without VBA (like stupid and repetitive tasks and user interfaces).

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:56:47 +0000

Derek - VBA isn't too tough. The macro recorder (see the next post) gives you much of what you need, then it's a matter of fiddling around, or using Google, to make it do wyat you need.

By: derek

derek — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:12:42 +0000

Just to be clear, I wasn’t saying I’m new to VBA as it applies to charts. I was saying I’m new to VBA, period.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:53:30 +0000

Derek – Charting was the last area of VBA I got into. There was something scary about it. Or that I was losing control. But I got over it, got into the branch of the object model that dealt with charts, and despite some funny business there, realized it’s really no different that the rest of it.

Dan – The advanced work is not readily available as tutorials. The examples in advanced Excel VBA is there, but hard to find. You might find it useful to expand your search to VB6: those resources are still available despite dot-net having taken over. There are a small number of advanced books. Walkenbach’s books range from beginner to more-than-intermediate, while advanced topics and details are found in the Excel VBA Handbook series and the seminal Professional Excel Development (look for authors Bullen, Bovey, and Green together, and occasional others).

Here is a link to a number of books about programming in Excel and VBA:
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/xlbooks.html#ExcelVBA

And here are the most advanced Excel VBA books you will find:

By: derek

derek — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:36:16 +0000

I look forward to this series. VBA is the frontier I just cannot seem to cross. I can do a lot with “charts and things” without VBA, but usually it means I have to maintain my sreadsheets myself. If I could turn my knowledge into robust simple programs, I could hand more work off to my colleagues :-)

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:29:59 +0000

You know Jon, I’m going to take a tangent on this topic. I am an experienced programmer (in other languages) and it seems like every VBA lesson out there assumes that you have no knowledge whatsoever. Are you aware of some better advanced material (i.e., I know how to program and now I want to know how to connect to a SQL server and a few excel sheets on networked drives and then perform data validation and calculations on the combined data with VBA). Sometimes I think it would be faster to figure out the COM model and just use IronPython :P

Excel’s object model is a bit quirky and it’s implementation of OOP seems to be lacking, where is the material on that stuff?

Thanks