How Can VBA Help You?
Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA, is the programming language built into Microsoft Office. It goes far beyond a simple recorded macro language and is capable of quite sophisticated programming.
The value of VBA is that you can use it to automate Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access applications. Programming in Microsoft Access is pretty common. [see our link] However, sometimes automating Word or Excel processes provides incredible savings of time and effort. Often, it is in the routine tasks that we find the biggest savings of time.
One of our clients prepares half a dozen lab reports, each with specific chart data, in an hour. We gave him a button to create the chart he needed, saving perhaps five minutes per chart.
When you look at VBA programming, it is often easy to calculate the ROI of a particular project. Sometimes it is the five minutes you save on simple tasks performed many times per day. Sometimes you can save an hour on large tasks that are performed regularly. And sometimes it is the tasks that are performed once or twice yearly that can be automated down from days to hours.
Pioneer Training began as a pure training company, but we quickly added consulting to our services as clients requested our help. We are comfortable working as pure trainers, pure programmers or in a mixture of the two helping clients develop their own applications.
Recent VBA Programming Projects
• Used Excel to track change orders for a manufacturer, including a set of weekly charts required by management.
We created a menu-driven system that lets users enter, edit, and close change orders. Using Excel allowed us to provide customized charts with the click of a button. Plus, sophisticated users could still examine the data using pivot tables, filters, etc.
• Automated the creation of reports and proposals for an engineering firm.
We created a Word template, with a set of customized headings, styles, and lists that could be applied from the Toolbar. The template enforced standards throughout the organization and the use of SEQ fields provided a bullet-proof method for combining multiple documents with multiple levels of list and Table of Contents formatting.
• Pushbutton creation of a regulatory filing.
Our client received downloads as multiple Excel spreadsheets, a base filing document, and a set of paragraphs to be inserted. The previous filing had taken days to prepare and format and the results were unsatisfactory. We created a menu in Excel and a similar one in Word, that automated the tasks of importing, summarizing, and formatting the individual spreadsheets, and merging the relevant data from Word and Excel into the base filing document. Our portion of the latest filing took less than an hour, most of which was waiting for the system to do its work.
• Simplified the printing of documents for a financial institution.
The Word Processing department routinely printed documents on a series of printers, on letterhead, copy and regular paper, and on other preprinted forms. Most documents required multiple copies on different grades of paper. We provided a Toolbar that has been in use for over five years, requiring changes only when new printers, new versions of Word, and new printers were installed.
VBA Training Classes
Introduction to Programming in Visual Basic
Introduction to Programming in Excel
Introduction to Programming in Word
Introduction to Programming in Access
Custom and Advanced Programming classes
Detailed class descriptions here.
We can provide customized classes in Visual Basic to cover specific issues or to go beyond the introductory classes.
Please call our office to schedule a class for your company.