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What is Basic MS Excel VBA Programming?

Visual Basic Application in MS Excel has been the most useful application for Excel users. If your daily task is to deal with long tables regularly, then it's obvious that it is going to be very much hectic. But by using VBA these tasks can be done in seconds. Most of the computer users are Office users but a major portion of this population has never tested, how VBA works in Excel. VBA can be used to automate several tasks in Excel to save several hours for an employee doing time-consuming stuff. In this regard 4D can provide you quality training.

What is VBA?

VBA refers to the Visual Basic Application, which can be defined as an event-driven programming language of Microsoft. This VBA is widely used across all Microsoft Office applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.

VBA in Excel can be used in multiple ways. A few of its uses are listed below :

Create different macros in VBA to automate tasks in Excel. These macros reduce both time and effort of the users.
The VBA in Excel contains a MsgBox. This msgbox is a dialog box that is used by the users to communicate or inform other users in your program.
Workbooks and Worksheets are also present in VBA which means it has collections of objects or object hierarchy. In simple terms, object hierarchy refers to the presence of one object inside the other and that object has another object.
The cells in a worksheet are represented by range objects. This range object is considered the most important part of Excel VBA.
In Excel VBA, variables can be declared, initialized, and displayed individually.
If then statements is used by the user in Excel VBA to execute code lines if a special condition arises.
Looping is considered to be the most powerful technique in programming and the Excel VBA loop allows to loop through a range of cells. But only a few cells can code lines.
In Excel VBA, string manipulation is an important function.
Different events or actions performed by users in Excel VBA that triggers the execution of different codes.
The array can be defined as a group of variables in Excel VBA. In Excel VBA, any particular variable of an array can be pointed out by just typing the array name and index number of that array.
In Excel VBA, the function and sub have only difference that the first one can return a value while the latter one can't.
Excel is the mother of all applications hence called application object.This application object gives access to excel related options.
Several ActiveX controls can be created like command buttons, text boxes, etc.
Excel VBA can be used to create a user form.

The array in an Excel VBA can have up to 32 dimensions in total. But in the majority of the cases, one to three dimensions are used. What do dimensions refer to in an array? The dimensions are the directions in which the specifications of the array object can be changed/adjusted. The number of dimensions in an array is denoted as rank.

1. One Dimension (1D)

One dimension is the most simple as it's array has only a single dimension. For example, the salary of employees. The element only keeps the count of the salary of every employee. Here, the variable has only a one-dimensional array.

2. Two Dimension (2D)

While some arrays contain two dimensions. These arrays can be used to compare things or can be used to have two different tally's together. For example, the age and weight of employees in an office. Here, the variable has two things to keep count which means it has a two-dimensional array.

3. Three Dimensional (3D)

Do you have multiple numbers of an element to note down? Then this 3D array will be very helpful to keep data of three variables of an array at a time.

4. Multiple Dimensional

Multiple dimensional tasks start with four dimensions (4D). This is rarely used in comparison to the previous three. And this array can hold multiple data at a time.