Tricks of the Microsoft Office Gurus

IN THIS CHAPTER

Learning VBA, or any programming language for that matter, is always easiest when the concepts are buttressed by examples that are both numerous and useful. Having lots of good examples to study enables you to immerse yourself in the language and see how things work first-hand. It's a lot like learning a human language: Classroom theory and practice will get you only so far; to really learn the tongue, you have to converse with native speakers all day long.

This book isn't designed to teach you VBA, but it is designed to offer you techniques both numerous and useful that will help you get the most out of Office and get your work done faster and more efficiently. VBA can be a big help here because you can use it to perform tasks that by hand would be inordinately time-consuming or even downright impossible. As proof, this chapter presents a bunch of VBA macros for Word, Excel, and Outlook. These procedures show you many techniques for programming these applications, but, more importantly, I chose the macros because they're all truly useful and time-saving. So even if you have no desire to learn VBA, you can still implement these macros on your own system to work faster and more efficiently.