Introducing Developer Tab Excel Vba Programming Course Lesson 3

Excel Vba Programming Course: Lesson 3: Introducing Developer Tab
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What Is Ribbon In Excel?
Ribbon is what we call the main menu. The ribbon consists of several tabs. For example: home, Insert, Page Layout, formulas etc. and each tab is made up of groups. Groups are just collections of related commands. For example on the Insert tab there are the tables group, the illustrations group, the Charts group and so on.
On the ribbon we also have this file option, which takes us into something called the backstage window. We can do a couple of extra Excel related functionalities like opening and saving a workbook, printing and more. Whenever we want to come back to the main Excel interface with the ribbon we just click on the file or any other tab.
Now, I want to do a brief rundown of some of the most popular commands on the developer tab. We're going to be diving into all of these in a lot greater detail over the course so don't worry if something doesn't make sense now I assure you, it will, in time.

The very first button we have here to the left is Visual Basic and this will actually open up the Visual Basic Editor or the VBE where we'll be writing the code throughout the course. The shortcut for this is ALT + F11.

To the right, we have a button, called macros. It will bring up the macro dialog box which is going to show us all macros that we have written and are public. Public means that they are exposed to the Excel interface so that a user can use them.

There are going to be a lot of options here for things like editing the keyboard shortcuts for a macro running it or even executing it step by step. Right Now we don't actually have any macros listed here but once we write macros they're all going to populate here.

Next is the Record Macro button. As it turns out Excel has a built in feature called the macro recorder. What the macro recorder does is generate automatic VBA code for you. Essentially you take actions on the worksheet and the macro recorder understands what you're doing and generates relevant VBA code. It can serve as a really great resource for generating code that we can look at and get a general sense of how things work within Excel.

Right below the Record Macro button, we have a "Use relative references" button. This is related to the macro recorder and the tracks how references are treated when there is a macro being recorded by references. For example If I have my mouse in cell A1 and I move to cell B3. There's 2 ways that you can interpret that movement. First is to say, he literally moved it to sell B3 the other way to interpret that moment is he moved 2 cells down and 1 cell to the right that the 2 conditions that I described there are called absolute and relative references and that option deals with how the macro recorder is going to treat your movements like that.

Finally we have Macro security button that's going to bring up our trust center which deals a lot with macro security. We're going to cover that in a few lessons so no need to worry about it now. Now let’s open our VBE- Visual Basic Editor. We're going to be writing all of our code here. This is a completely separate application. It is connected to excel but it is running in its own separate window with its own separate memory and I can imagine how this new visual basic editor might be a lot to take in for beginners. It's totally fine if you don't know any of this. We're going to dive into all of these details over time. What I recommend you to try to get a general sense of what's going on here.

And in the next lesson we're going to start our actual set up for the course and we're going to discuss Excel file types.

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