Dissect and Learn Excel® VBA in 24 Hours: Changing workbook appearance

No matter how complicated a program is, it is made of many smaller and tiny fundamental working parts of programming code. Each of them accomplishes a specific task. Some may just consist of only one or a few lines of code. Knowing the functions of these fundamental working parts, you can then easily write an unlimited number of working programs. And knowing them, you can easily understand the programs written by others and adopt into your programs the ideas and the VBA code that are presented in those programs.

Dissect and Learn Excel VBA in 24 Hours is a series of quick references to VBA code for intermediate users who are looking for ideas and samples of VBA code to accomplish certain tasks when they are in the process of writing a program.

In this series, you will see thousands of tiny working parts of VBA code that are used to accomplish many simple and yet meaningful tasks. To add a new workbook, to auto-fill a range, to sort a table of data, to generate a table of contents of all chart sheets and worksheets, to loop through and manipulate a folder of Excel files, to add a control to the Ribbon, to send an email, and to login to an account in the Internet are some examples of these tiny working parts.

This series is for readers, who have at least a basic understanding of Excel VBA programming. In order to follow the discussions in the series, a reader must know, for examples, what Sub procedures and Sub functions are, what Visual Basic Editor (VBE) is, how to add a VBA module into a workbook, how to turn on the AutoList Members option in VBE, how to use the Macro Recorder in Excel in order to find out the new methods and properties of objects that you are not familiar with, how to use the Object Browser to check the complete list of members for a particular object, how to write some simple Sub procedures, in which VBA modules you should store your VBA code, and how to use the debugging tools in VBE.

If you are totally new to Excel VBA, please teach yourself Excel VBA before exploring the contents in the series. You may refer to another book written by me entitled Learn Excel® VBA in 24 Hours - A quick reference for beginners, which was written for those who are new to Excel VBA.

I hope this series of books will serve as quick references in facilitating you to write an unlimited number of working VBA programs. Let Excel VBA work for you.

Book 1: Changing workbook appearance focuses on changing the appearance of the worksheet cells, the worksheets of a workbook, the row and column headings, the sheet tabs, the layout view of a worksheet, the status bar, the formula bar, the Ribbon, and the Cell context menu. Figure 1 shows the components that will undergo certain changes in their appearances. In this book, almost half of it covers on how to customize the Ribbon.

The main purpose of changing the appearance is to let the users to have a better working experience when they are using your program. The changes may affect from just a worksheet cell, a range of cells, and a worksheet to the entire active workbook and every opened workbook. To see how the code affects the appearance, simply copy and paste the code into the Immediate window, a VBA module, or Custom UI Editor, and run the VBA code (or step through the VBA code by using the debugger in VBE) or reopen the file (that stores the code) in Excel.

This book ends with a sample program that adopts most of the ideas that are discussed in the book. You may download the program (for Excel 2007, 2010-2016) to see how it changes the appearance of a workbook.