Learn VBA Programming from basic: 1

What is Excel?

I believe this is the most basic concept an excel user should know.

Before the digital revolution, when business recorded their sales information in huge log book. It had quite cumbersome for them to maintain that. With the advent of computers, there was a constant need of developing something that could make the record keeping easy. Then a concept of spreadsheet came.

Spreadsheet was and is a way to record, arrange and manage your data effectively. Then Microsoft built its own application to provide the spreadsheet capabilities. Since then, this application has been continuously revised with new features added and now making it one of the most powerful tool for data storage, analysis and visualization.

Below are the important thing to note

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Excel is the application for spreadsheet.

- Workbook is the collection of related spreadsheets. For example, if you are planning for your birthday. You will create a new Workbook named “My Birthday” and this workbook will have 3 sheets by default.

- Worksheets is the actual spreadsheet. It is important for you to know that a worksheet can only be available under a workbook. When you open a new workbook, the “Sheet1”, “Sheet2” and “Sheet3” you see at the bottom are the worksheet names.

The worksheets consists of Rows and columns. The Rows starts from 1 till some 1,048,576. And columns are defined as alphabets. Starting from A to Z and start again from AA, AB … to XFD.

You should be aware that there is one more way to reference an address. It is denoted as R1C1.

- Cell - this is the atom of excel. That is, it is smallest unit that can store data. It is referred as A1, or A2 or XF1 (Column character and the row number)

- Range – as the name suggest this is the range of cells. To reference a range of cells, you will use the <starting cell> : <end cell>