Massive Programs

[Nine Zero]

Hello all,

I have been coding in VBA for a little over a year now and it is something i wish i would have learned a lot sooner. The current job where i work at now has a lot of user data entry and i have created some useful userforms and spreadsheets to help them out in their daily tasks.

My question is, is it worth my time to create something that does tons of things, links to many different locations, updates lots of files and much more?

I ask because due to this being macro based, i always have the fear of changing something that i shouldnt have changed in the first place and overwriting the wrong thing in a file and losing that input.

Should i perhaps educate myself some more in error handling or in verification perhaps?

Any input is appreciated as well as any examples of anyone's HUGE projects i would be interested in what others have created.

Thank you

 

[Joe4]

My advice would be to be careful not to create anything too unwieldly, or recreate the wheel.

A lot of times when I hear things like this, my first thought is, it sounds like they are creating a database. While you CAN use Excel to do that, it is often very clunky and inefficient. There are better programs for that type of stuff, database programs like Access, SQL, or Oracle. A lot of the stuff that you have to create VBA code to do is basic functionality in these other programs )one such example is Forms, which are a big pain in Excel and actually very easy in Access, as fields can be automatically bound to fields, they don't need to be assigned via VBA). One big concern with Excel is it may become so big that it doesn't run anymore, or runs extremely slowly.

So my best advice to you is to program with the future in mind, and try to determine what programs will best serve that goal going forward (not just tomorrow, but in a few years).