First. A caveat. I do NOT want these pages to be taken for instructional material on how to write software in Basic. I am NOT an expert – or even a passably decent programmer – in Basic. I’m a novice, well, perhaps a bit more, but certainly not anyone who could be considered a developer of any value. Not yet, anyway. This is about having fun and messing around and hopefully picking up some ideas and a few abilities and most of all demystifying that whole process called ‘computer programming’. And a standing invitation is hereby extended to any real Basic programmers who see code that can be done a better way: please feel free to offer your opinion and more importantly, suggestions!

For better or for worse, VBA is a reasonably good development environment for people like me who have always wished they could program but find getting into C++ or some other “real” programming language too daunting and who have ready access to MS Office and/or Excel. The Excel VBE (Visual Basic Development Environment) in Excel can easily be brought up in Excel by pressing [Alt][F11]… and there you have it, all the tools you could want to create macros right up to complete user-friendly forms, forms that can act as an interface for a huge data-filled spreadsheet that would be otherwise awkward and a bit daunting to maintain.

What I intend to do with these pages is demonstrate How Easy it is to make user forms that do Cool Stuff in the VBE, and then, how those forms can be ported to an entirely different environment.

First a bit about data in a spreadsheet.

Excel is primarily a number-crunching application. It stores numbers and other information in columns and rows of ‘cells’. You can enter formulas in a cell that will perform computations on values in other cells. This is really where Excel shines.

Whilst using Excel as a Word Processor is not a good idea, I’ve seen it done. What I’ve seen quite frequently is using it as a quasi-database. Indeed, I’ve seen it used more for that than as a ledger. And because I find it infinitely more stable as a product than Access, I have used it as a flat-file database quite frequently.

So, let’s look at how it can be used as a data management system using forms.