What is VBA good for?

Question

Besides making macros, what is VBA good for?

I'm in an intro programming class for Engineering, and I don't really see any use for it.

Answer 1

vba is good for what any programming language is good for.

VBA suffers from the same problem as Javascript in the past: a lot of wanabees who are tackling VBA superficially without knowing it is a full featured language which can use classes and classes interfaces like other OOP languages see here:

http://msaccessvbatutorial.com/blog/introduction-to-object-oriented-programming-with-ms-access-vba/

Answer 2

VBA is for programming Microsoft applications, hence the A in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). That is the only thing it's used for.

Answer 3

"Besides making macros." Well, depending on how you define "macro", that's all it's good for. But that's an awful lot.

It lets you build new applications on top of Microsoft products such as Excel or Access. You can use it to build and control customized spreadsheets that provide a high degree of automation for engineering computations -- that's probably why they're teaching it to you. Working inside Excel or Access also gives you a lot of capabilities that you would have to write yourself in another language. Plus it's readily available on any machine with Office.

Answer 4

I think it's great for programming newbies, learn programming by creating macros.

Answer 5

For Engineers another important use of VBA is to easily extend Excel's function library by creating and deploying VBA user-defined functions that can be used in Excel formulae.

See http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/ for examples.

Answer 6

Now I dont think for you to consider where practically VBA is used, as of now if you try understand why is it used and How it is used, that will build your understanding platform. when you are out of the Engineering, You will be able to apply the same skills and adopt the new technology in No time.

VBA is a Microsoft product and Used for the Creating the Macros