VBA — Visual Basic for Applications — is built into various Microsoft®products, including Excel, Word, and Access. VBA enables you to add features to applications that multiply their functionality, and this book will show you how to extend your Access applications with VBA.

You will begin with the programming life cycle, the Visual Basic Editor environment, and essential programming concepts. You’ll move through object-oriented programming concepts, learn to retrieve and update data with ADO, use VBA to create reports programmatically, export Access data to various Web formats, and migrate an existing Access database to an Access project that uses SQL Server®. You’ll learn advanced topics such as working with external DLLs, handling security, creating transactions, and creating custom code libraries. You will also learn how to distribute your application, and using two case studies, you will apply these concepts to a project tracking application and a customer service application. These case studies illustrate some of the more advanced and impressive features your Access applications can include, such as generating e-mails programmatically.

What you will learn from this book
* Object-oriented programming techniques using VBA
* How to use built-in objects and create your own
* How to use ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) to retrieve and update data
* Methods for creating reports and Web content from the database
* Techniques for integrating with Office applications
* How to build SQL Server solutions with Access projects

Who this book is for

This book is for Access users and programmers who have created databases that include tables, forms, and possibly macros. No prior experience with VBA is required.

Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.

What is this book about?

Written by an Access programmer with more than 10 years of VBA experience, this is the perfect guide for Access users who are ready to take their databases to the next level, or for programmers who are new to Access or VBA. Veteran Access developer Denise Gosnell shows readers the ins and outs of Access VBA and provides plenty of source code, and fully developed sample applications to guide you along the way.

Not only do readers learn to build “stand-alone” desktop applications, but readers also learn how to integrate Access applications with Web Services, and SQL Server.