6 Best Excel VBA Programming Books (For Beginners & Advanced Users)

Do you often find yourself doing repetitive tasks over and over again in Excel and wishing that somehow, someway, these tasks could be automated? Well, the good news is that these tasks can be automated using macros.

What are macros? These are concise pieces of VBA code that allow you to automate tasks. VBA stands for Visual Basic for Applications, a programming language native to the Office environment that allows one to extend the functionality of Office. VBA is quite a versatile language, and you can use it to create macros, manipulate values in cells, and open and create workbooks, among other things. Once you really get beyond the basics, you can manipulate Word and PowerPoint files from within the Excel VBA environment.

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Simple macros can be recorded without ever engaging with the Visual Basic environment extensively. Using the macro recorder, Excel records all one’s actions one performs in the workbook you are using, so for example if one copies and pastes, the macro recorder records that. The macro recorder functionality is also a good assistant for learning VBA code. Once you’ve recorded your macro, you can access it via the Developer tab or get a button that runs the macro.

The button click event for example, and how it works, can be demonstrated and quickly conceptualized with a macro. In Excel, you can also access worksheet functions and use standard worksheet functions such as VLOOKUP, in VBA.

To help you get started with macros, we have put together a list of helpful books.

Best Excel VBA Learning Books for Beginners

• Excel 2013 Power Programming with VBA by John Walkenbach (the best one to start with)
• Excel 2016 Power Programming with VBA (Mr. Spreadsheet’s Bookshelf) by Michael Alexander, Richard Kusleika
• Excel 2010 Power Programming with VBA by John Walkenbach

Best Excel VBA books for Professional Development

• Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft Excel, VBA, and .NET (2nd Edition) by Rob Bovey, Dennis Wallentin, Stephen Bullen, John Green

Best Books to Get Ready-Made Macro for Beginners

• 101 Ready-To-Use Excel Macros by Michael Alexander

Best Excel VBA Books for Modelers

• VBA for Modelers: Developing Decision Support Systems with Microsoft Office Excel by S. Christian Albright

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