Introduction to
Access VBA
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ike many professional RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems),
Microsoft Access comes with its own programming language called VBA.
VBA, or Visual Basic for Applications, is a subset of Microsoft’s popular
enterprise programming language Visual Basic. VBA follows the Visual Basic lan-
guage syntax and comes with many of its common features such as an integrated
development environment (IDE) and many common controls for building profes-
sional event-driven and data-driven applications.
Though VBA supports the look and feel of Visual Basic, it is not Visual Basic. A
main difference being that Visual Basic allows for creation of executable programs,
whereas VBA does not. Moreover, VBA for Access is specifically designed for
Microsoft Access. Meaning, it has knowledge of and support for the Microsoft
Access object model. The concept of an object model is different for each
Microsoft Office application. For example, both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft
Word support VBA, but each has its own object model.
The Event-Driven Paradigm
The event-driven paradigm is a powerful programming model that allows pro-
grammers to build applications that respond to actions initiated by the user or
system. Access VBA includes a number of events that are categorized by the
objects they represent. VBA programmers write code in event procedures to
respond to user actions (such as clicking a command button) or system actions
(such as a form loading).
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