Opening the VBA module is the same in all Microsoft Office programs, but I will choose Excel because we will have as much flexibility as we want with the calculations.
click to enlarge
You do not need to stick with the default naming scheme of course. If you rename your file (your Excel workbook) to something else, such as “My_Workbook” and save, you will see that on the left pane VBA Project(Book 1) changes to VBA Project(My_Workbook). The same way, if you rename the worksheets, the changes will be applied to the Sheets under Microsoft Excel Objects. Let’s rename Sheet1 to Calculations, Sheet2 to Detailed_Reports and Sheet3 to Summary_Report. On the left pane in Visual Basic Editor, you will see that Sheet1(Sheet1) has changed to Sheet1(Calculations), Sheet2(Detailed_Reports) and Sheet3(Summary_Report.) However, if you switch back to your workbook and change the order of the worksheets, for example move Summary_Report to the left of the Calculations, the Sheet1, Sheet2 and Sheet3 notation will not change. The notation has an advantage: you can refer to the sheets as you name them. You do not need to say “Sheet1” in your code, go with “Calculations.”
Regarding the two dropboxes, there is such a thing as declaring variables in programming. I will try to keep things as simple as possible here, and open things up where necessary, to avoid losing you in the article. There are two types of variables: global and private. Global variables will be available in all modules in the code, whereas Private variables will only be available in the module it is defined under.
Also, there are the Sub and Functions. These are the two sections of code that perform a specific action. Function returns a value and Sub does not. We will come back to that later.
Read on for more details on Global Declarations, our first excel VBA application and making calculations.
