Preface
Few software applications are as ubiquitous as Microsoft Word, which
has been around for more than 20 yearspractically an eternity
in computer time. Even as competitors, such as OpenOffice.org, emerge
from the open source community, their success relies heavily on how
much they look and act like Word. When most people think of word
processing, they think of Microsoft Word. Word is a powerful word processor, but it offers a lot more. It is
almost infinitely customizable, which means you
don't have to settle for the
features and interface that come "out of the
box." But more importantly, it is also almost
infinitely programmable. Using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA),
you can do from a program almost anything you can do from the Word
interface, and you can usually do it much, much faster. People often refer to
programs written to
control Word
using VBA as macros. The term
"macro," short for
"macro command," typically means a
sequence of commands (usually keystrokes) recorded from within an
application and played back as a single command. While you can indeed
record macros like that in Word using VBA, VBA is much more than a
macro language: it's a powerful, full-featured
programming language. But old habits die hard, so this book will
often refer to VBA programs as macros. |