stepping into a vba excel role...

[codesmith]

hi - my programming skills with vba is below par ... but i am a quick learner ...

my programming ability is strong ... but the familiarity with the language is weak .. if you get me.

I am about to step into an excel vba programming role ... and wanted to know how hard it may be to understand other peoples code ... what to do if i dont understand it ... or how to go about getting into the role quickly and smoothly as possible?

has anyone been in a similar situation to me?

 

[RoryA]

I've never been in exactly that position (programming is not actually my job, it's just how I get things done) but I have had to read a lot of other people's code - both professional and dabblers - so here are a few thoughts:
1. If you're lucky, whoever you are taking over from, or joining with, has conventions in place as regards naming of vairables/subs/functions and commenting of code. That will make life a lot easier.
2. If you know Excel as a program, that should help you quite a bit, not only to understand code, but to write it and to improve existing code.
3. If in doubt, it can be very useful to turn screen updating on and simply step through code with the Excel window visible and watch what happens. Also, the Locals, Immediate and Watch windows in the VBE are extremely handy.
Hope that's of some use.

PS If you can get hold of an old MS Office Developer Guide, there used to be an object model map in there that's quite useful.

 

[codesmith]

thats what i have started doing, that is, perusing other peoples code on here. there are some coders on here that have a good style ... trying to pick up on it and assimilate. I guess I should also look at the coders that aren't as good as others too, never know what you might get!

 

[RoryA]

Yeah, you often learn as much from revising less well-written code than from reading well-written stuff.
From the point of view of writing your own code, it's very useful to build up your own library of standard functions for things like finding the last used row on a worksheet, checking if a workbook is open, or if a sheet exists in a workbook and so on. Not complicated routines, but you'll use them over and over again.