Chapter 1. Introduction

To applications developers, end users, corporate buyers, and software vendors, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is becoming an increasingly important language. But VBA is more than just another software language; VBA is a unique conceptual method of creating professional business-oriented solutions.

VBA is the same language whether you are using it to create a Visual Basic application or to automate some task within Word or Excel. When you fire up your copy of the retail version of Visual Basic, the vast majority of language elements you use actually come from VBAx.DLL, the VBA library. Just look in the Object Browser to see how dependent on VBA Visual Basic actually is. Consequently, this book concentrates on the core VBA language regardless of its context.