Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is the tool you can use to customize Excel, make your own functions, and automate your repetitive tasks. In Excel 5 and Excel 95 you can use different programming languages when you write VBA macros. In Excel 97 it's no more multilingual programming. All VBA-programming takes place in English. This has both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that you can use your macros without worrying about what language version of Excel the users will use. This makes it easy to share macros all over the world. It's also probably written more books about VBA-programming in English, and you can get excellent support on the Internet. The disadvantage with using English as your programming language is that you in some cases will have problems with your national characteristics like date- and number formats and list separator characters.

The tips in these web pages are not intended as a beginners guide to macro programming, but will hopefully be of help for those who want to get some ideas to make their macros better.

When I refer to menu items in Excel, this is written with a comma (,) as a separator between the menu and the menu item,
e.g. File, New....
Several commas can occur if the menu description contains submenus,
e.g. Tools, Macro, Macros....