From the course: Excel: Macros and VBA for Beginners

Making the case: Why a macro and not regular Excel? - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel: Macros and VBA for Beginners

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Making the case: Why a macro and not regular Excel?

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- Why VBA and recorded macros? Why not Excel formulas, pivot tables, or Power Query? I'll admit that Power Query has greatly reduced how much VBA I need to write, but VBA still has its place, and I'm going to give you four reasons. Number one, legacy. VBA has been in Excel since 1993, and that means there are countless workbooks driven by VBA code. And one day, you might inherit one of them if you haven't already. But when you do, you assume responsibility for it and it helps to understand the basics of that code. Second. Jobs that are too big or too tedious can be automated. And one time, I had VBA run from Friday to Sunday because I had 30,000 pages of data to process. I programmed VBA to crank through one sheet at a time while I was at the grocery store, sleeping, or watching television. Number three. VBA is in Excel already. Now, we have all these new tools like Python and Office Scripts, but VBA is in Excel and doesn't require you to save your file in the cloud. It doesn't require your employer to have specific licenses. You have VBA. The fourth reason, I call safety and peace of mind. Let's say you've got a basic process that doesn't require VBA coding, but you're turning it over to someone who is not trained in Excel or they're scared of breaking the world if they corrupt a formula. You can automate the task in VBA and give them a button to push, and the task will run, and we've sidestepped world catastrophe. Yes, there still is a place for VBA and those are just four main reasons.

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