Getting started with VBA Programming

• Using code to make applications do things
• The Object Model
• Methods and Properties

Using code to make applications do things

You might think that writing code is mysterious or difficult, but the basic principles use every-day reasoning and are quite accessible. Microsoft Office applications are created in such a way that they expose things called objects that can receive instructions, in much the same way that a phone is designed with buttons that you use to interact with the phone. When you press a button, the phone recognizes the instruction and includes the corresponding number in the sequence that you are dialing. In programming, you interact with the application by sending instructions to various objects in the application. These objects are expansive, but they have their limits. They can only do what they are designed to do, and they will only do what you instruct them to do.

For example, consider the user who opens a document in Word, makes a few changes, saves the document, and then closes it. In the world of VBA programming, Word exposes a Document object. By using VBA code, you can instruct the Document object to do things such as Open, Save, or Close. The following section discusses how objects are organized and described.

The Object Model

Developers organize programming objects in a hierarchy, and that hierarchy is called the object model of the application. Word, for example, has a top-level Application object that contains a Document object. The Document object contains Paragraph objects and so on. Object models roughly mirror what you see in the user interface. They are a conceptual map of the application and its capabilities.

The definition of an object is called a class, so you might see these two terms used interchangeably. Technically, a class is the description or template that is used to create, or instantiate, an object. Once an object exists, you can manipulate it by setting its properties and calling its methods. If you think of the object as a noun, the properties are the adjectives that describe the noun and the methods are the verbs that animate the noun. Changing a property changes some quality of appearance or behavior of the object. Calling one of the object methods causes the object to perform some action.

The VBA code in this article runs against an open Office application where many of the objects that the code manipulates are already up and running; for example, the Application itself, the Worksheet in Excel, the Document in Word, the Presentation in PowerPoint, the Explorer and Folder objects in Outlook. Once you know the basic layout of the object model and some key properties of the Application that give access to its current state, you can start to extend and manipulate that Office application with VBA in Office.

Methods

In Word, for example, you can change the properties and invoke the methods of the current Word document by using the ActiveDocument property of the Application object. This ActiveDocument property returns a reference to the Document object that is currently active in the Word application. "Returns a reference to" means "gives you access to." The following code does exactly what it says; that is, it saves the active document in the application.

Application.ActiveDocument.Save

Read the code from left to right, "In this Application, with the Document referenced by ActiveDocument, invoke the Save method." Be aware that Save is the simplest form of method; it does not require any detailed instructions from you. You instruct a Document object to Save and it does not require any more input from you.

If a method requires more information, those details are called parameters. The following code runs the SaveAs method, which requires a new name for the file.

Application.ActiveDocument.SaveAs2 "New Document Name.docx"

Values listed in parentheses after a method name are the parameters. Here, the new name for the file is a parameter for the SaveAs method.

Properties

You use the same syntax to set a property that you use to read a property. The following code executes a method to select cell A1 in Excel and then to set a property to put something in that cell.

Application.ActiveSheet.Range("A1").Value = "Hello World

The first challenge in VBA programming is to get a feeling for the object model of each Office application and to read the object, method, and property syntax. The object models are similar in all Office applications, but each is specific to the kind of documents and objects that it manipulates.

In the above code snippet, there is the Application object, Excel this time, and then the ActiveSheet, which provides access to the active worksheet. After that is a term not as familiar, Range, which means "define a range of cells in this way." The code instructs Range to create itself with just A1 as its defined set of cells. "Hello World" is stored in the Value property of the cell A1.

The simplest VBA code that you write might simply gain access to objects in the Office application that you are working with and set properties. For example, you could get access to the rows in a table in Word and change their formatting in your VBA script. That sounds simple, but it can be incredibly useful; once you can write that code, you can harness all of the power of programming to make those same changes in several tables or documents, or make them according to some logic or condition. For a computer, making 1000 changes is no different from making 10, so there is an economy of scale here with larger documents and problems, and that is where VBA can really shine and save you time.