March 25th, 2004John T. Anderson - AFE board test VBA Visual Basic For Applications (VBA) - AFE Board-level Test Package What to Expect Today –lots of graph objects –forms –buttons galore –nearly impenetrable code –a wide variety of examples of how to do various things –a wider variety of examples of how NOT to do various things What I hope you’ll ‘get’ from today’s efforts –Some ideas you can use in your applications –Some boilerplate modules you can use with minimal fuss –confidence. Hey, if a dummy like me can get this far, think of how far you bright people can get!

March 25th, 2004John T. Anderson - AFE board test VBA About as “basic” as VBA gets.... Let’s look first at the “rm_generic” application on the server for the course. This is about as trivial an application as you can get. It was used make a 1553 Rack Monitor drive a few bits out in patterns to exercise some relays we had wired to it –Bet you get an error opening it up! That’s one of the problems with auto-executing macros. –Let’s take a minute and explore these items: Code for ‘this workbook’ Relay_tests module and usage of put_1553 and, if you haven’t had enough versions already, I wrote a hex decoder too (third or fourth one you’ve seen by now, I’d bet)

March 25th, 2004John T. Anderson - AFE board test VBA OK, let’s get to the AFE board. Please close the RM_generic application and instead open up the “AFE_board_test.xls”. Allow me to talk to you a bit about navigation in the sheets –use of a ‘global parameters’ sheet –spinner button for graphs –we’ll just walk around a bit. The idea of this sheet was to make a test setup that would be used by someone who had no idea what the AFE does. –That’s fine, but it’s got more functions than a Swiss Army knife Just displayed as a bunch of sheets, the word ‘impenetrable’ comes to mind. I chose to use forms.

March 25th, 2004John T. Anderson - AFE board test VBA Forms, subforms, and makin’ code In what should come as no surprise, forms are just a collection of objects that you write code for to handle various events. You’ve seen that all before. Forms are just a trick to ‘hide’ that it’s Excel and make a more friendly interface Forms let you mix controls and display how you want it - sometimes a little nicer than the spreadsheet. Let’s go thru how it is done and tell war stories along the way.