Wise Owl Training - VBA macros blogs (page 1 of 4)

Wordle in Excel VBA

Posted by Andrew Gould on 31 January 2022

Have you played Wordle yet? You should, it's great! We're a bit obsessed with it at Wise Owl so Andrew, Andy and Sam have all been working their own versions of the game in VBA, Python and Power BI(!) respectively. Check out this quick intro to Andrew's VBA version.

Building a word search system in Excel VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 02 February 2021

My aim in this blog is to show how you can go about building any computer system from scratch (and not just a word search in Excel VBA). Along the way I've included lots of hints and tips!

Using the WOWSER Excel VBA system to build a word search

Posted by Andy Brown on 01 February 2021

Follow this blog to construct your own word search, complete with a missing phrase spelt out by the unused letters!

How to have fun pixellating and reconstructing images in VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 August 2020

You can have great fun taking your favourite image (a picture of your loved one?) and pixellating it in VBA. The results are stored as RGB numbers in a workbook - what you do with them then is up to you!

Should you use JavaScript or VBA to program in Excel?

Posted by Andy Brown on 28 June 2020

Is JavaScript for Office (also known as OFFICE-JS) the next big thing? Unless you're a full-time web developer, emphatically no - this blog gives 3 reasons why you should continue to write your Office programs in humble VBA.

Use VBA to create Microsoft Team meetings

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 26 June 2020

Did you know that you can create Microsoft Team meetings using VBA in Outlook? This blog shows you how!

Talking to Excel to fill in your input forms, using speech recognition and VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 March 2020

What happens when you combine the magic of speech recognition with the power of VBA? A user form which you can fill in without a keyboard!

Announcing the first Wise Owl online training course (Excel VBA)

Posted by Andy Brown on 10 January 2020

After a huge investment of time and expertise, we're proud to announce that our first full online training course is now live on our website! The course shows you how to program in VBA in Excel, and is completely free (you don't even have to log in to follow it).

Problems with the Application.ScreenUpdating = False command in VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 June 2019

Some people are experiencing problems when trying to suppress screen updates while macros are running in Excel VBA, under Windows 10. This blog gives one possible solution.

A short-cut key to bring up the arguments of user-defined functions

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 June 2019

When you discover a new short-cut key, should you share it? This blog shows a way to bring up Intellisense for the arguments to user-defined functions in Excel VBA.

How to get Excel to read out cell values on calculation

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 September 2016

A short blog explaining how you can get Excel to read out values in cells every time that you recalculate a worksheet.

Referring to a range using square brackets

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 December 2015

This short blog shows that there is a third way to refer to a range, other than using the RANGE or CELLS keywords.

This blog explains the lesser known but better Excel VBA InputBox function

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 December 2015

There are two ways you can display an input box using Excel macros: the standard VBA InputBox function, or the much better (but lesser known, at least by this blog's author) Application.InputBox function.

Disabling Screen Updates in Excel VBA

Posted by Andrew Gould on 26 November 2015

You can give your VBA code a performance boost by simply turning off screen updating while your code runs. This blog explains how to achieve this and how to create a basic timer to test the results.

Installing the Microsoft Date and Time Picker for VBA

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 February 2015

Some versions of Windows don't include the very useful Date and Time Picker control. This blog explains how to install the mscomct2.ocx file to get it back!

How to insert ActiveX controls after CANNOT INSERT OBJECT message

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 January 2015

When using Excel, we owls have had problems inserting ActiveX objects after recent security updates. Here's a solution which worked for us!

VBA code to create a chart and textbox, and copy them to Word

Posted by Andy Brown on 03 October 2014

Charts in VBA are a bit weird: this blogs highlights some of their foibles, by showing how charts are really just special shapes, which contain shapes of their own!

Programmatically searching websites using VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 19 September 2014

I've already pinched (with permission!) the ideas of Fergus Cairns to explain ways to run automatic searches on popular websites like Google; this blog gives an update on the same topic.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 13 - Playing Sounds

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 April 2014

This part of the tutorial explains how to add sounds to the game using a Windows API function.

Flappy Bird in Excel VBA Part 12 - Managing Game State

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 April 2014

This part of the tutorial implements a state system to make it easier to determine what actions to perform each time the game updates.