Page 8 - Excel Progamming Weekend Crash Course

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Preface

icrosoft 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 pro-
M gram. Unknown to many users, Excel is also a sophisticated platform for develop-
ment 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 with-
out 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 sim-
ple, 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 information to guide them through the learning process. Excel
programming can be somewhat complicated, which is unavoidable for such a powerful tool,
but the truth is that almost any reasonably computer-literate person can learn how to pro-
gram in Excel. That’s where this book comes in handy.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is aimed at anyone who wants to use programming to improve his or her Excel
skills. Perhaps you only want to write programs for your own use, or maybe you need to cre-
ate Excel programs for use by your coworkers. In either situation, this book is aimed at you.
The book was written specifically with the nonspecialist in mind. You do not need to have
any programming knowledge or experience to use this book because everything from square
one is explained. Of course, if you do have some programming experience, it will not hurt,
but the important point is that such experience is not required.

Weekend Crash Course Layout and Features

This book contains 30 sessions, each of which is designed to be completed in about 30 min-
utes. Each session has a review section at the end and a list of questions so you can test
your knowledge. The sessions are organized into six parts; the main purpose of each part is