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Q. I am just a beginner to Visual Basic. I am working to become proficient on my own. I got into it about a year ago when I was trying to write (modify) macros in Microsoft Excel 5.0. They call it Visual Basic for Applications or VBA.

My Question: Is Visual Basic, as you know it, the same as Microsoft's VBA? And if I become proficient in VBA, would it be applicable to the real Visual Basic?

Thanks very much.

From: Robert J. Villa
Email: rjvilla@lanl.gov

A. Bob, Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications both stem from the same language - Basic. In that way they have at least a fundamental similarity. You will also find that the extensions to Basic that were included to allow Visual Basic to interact with Windows are also very much the same in Visual Basic for Applications. In fact they both have a very similar level of Object Orientation. The way you address objects, collections of objects and other such things, the way you respond to events, call methods and set properties is the same across both languages. In some cases there are slight variations in the specific names of events or properties but in general they are almost the same. In fact you will find even more similarity between VBA and Visual Basic 4 than with VB3 as VB4 uses VBA as its central code engine. This means that they are in fact the same under the covers. The real difference in VBA is that it is embedded in some other product (Excel, Project, Access, whatever).

I guess to sum up, skills in Visual Basic itself or in Visual Basic for Applications are highly transferrable from one to the other. You should find the transition from one to the other quite easy.

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