Microsoft Excel is a powerful spreadsheet program; in fact, it’s the most widely used
spreadsheet program worldwide, but Excel is a lot more than just a spreadsheet program.
Unknown to many users, Excel is also a sophisticated platform for development
of custom applications. Lurking behind its mild-mannered spreadsheet disguise is a
powerful and full-featured programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). If you have recorded and played back an Excel macro, you have used VBA—perhaps without being aware of it.
There’s much more to VBA programming than recording macros, however. Nearly any user
can write VBA programs to perform a wide variety of tasks in Excel, ranging from the simple, such as automating financial calculations, to the complex, such as creating a data entry system with custom forms and data validation. Unfortunately, many users shy away from taking advantage of Excel’s programmability because it seems too complicated, and they cannot find a good source of informat