CBA is essentially the programming language under the hood of all the Microsoft Office programs practically anything that you can do in any of these applications can be automated with a Visual Basic program which is also known as a macro and since VBA operates across all of The Office programs that means that you can automate procedures that work between applications generally we can say that VBA can help with tasks between documents or inside documents themselves so for example you might want to use a VBA program to collect information from multiple workbooks at once to put the
data into a single location where you can analyze it you can also use data on hand to run procedures that generate documents like memos notifications or standardized form letters or if you find yourself consistently producing the same report from a standardized data set you could just have a VBA program do it for you inside documents you can use VBA to create custom procedures to automate standardized tasks create your own shortcuts Excel formulas and even add-ins which are essentially their own software packages so so let's take a look at some real VBA programs that accomplish just
these kinds of tasks here's an example of a harvester program that Aggregates data from several different workbooks the program Cycles through each one of the workbooks that we're using for this project and collects the information into a master table where I can run the numbers on it myself BBA is especially useful for generating standardized kinds of documents including highly customizable Mass mailings here we've got a data set that we use each week to send out notification letters to our clients instead of doing it manually or using words mail merge function we just use a VBA
program to generate the letters this saves a lot of time and because it's been automated we never worry about mistakes maybe the most noteworthy application of Visual Basic is in its use for generating project dashboards and reports in this example we have a standard data set that we can use to generate one of two different kinds of reports here you can see that VBA makes it possible to solicit information from the user it begins the program by cleaning and formatting the data and then dropping it into one of our report templates at the end it
asks the user to categorize whatever new entries pop up and it saves the information so you never have to enter it again so those are just some examples of what VBA can do between workbooks let's talk about what it can do inside workbooks this is where you can get really fancy since VBA is the language under the hood of Microsoft Office programs you can use it for all kinds of custom tasks and here we're talking mostly about what you can do in Excel if you've ever used Excel you're probably familiar with the fact that there
are a whole lot of standard issue formulas that you can use to make your life easier but if you've got especially complicated needs or if you just want to save yourself some time DBA lets you write your own custom formulas here we have one called communa custom lookup which we use to figure out next steps with any given one of our study participants custom programs like this one which highlight the row and column of an active cell make it way easier for you to go through data that has lots of rows or columns finally you
can use VBA to develop custom add-ins which are like your own unique unque software packages this one in the custom table processing tab takes each one of the tables in this workbook sorts it and then prints each one into a document so that we can review the results of our survey so that just scratches the surface of what's possible with Visual Basic for Microsoft Office if you want to learn Visual Basic I recommend the YouTube videos of a group called Wise Owl tutorials
