Hi ...

I am, after several years of half-hearted attempts, making a serious
effort to learn Excel VBA. Why is it so hard to do just simple stuff?? I
just get so frustrated. The help files are of little value. I almost never
find what I'm looking for, and when I do I am seldom intelligent enough to
adapt the example to my own code.

I was an amateur programmed back in the days of DOS QuickBasic, and a
pretty good one, even if I say so myself.

But I just cannot catch on to Excel VBA. I have a book, an old one.
"Using Visual Basic For Applications Excel Edition." Written by Jeff Webb,
published 1994. Outdated of course, but I couldn't make sense of this book
when I bought it back in 1994.

Why is it so hard to do simple, basic stuff?? Tonight I've been working
on a very easy problem, but, after an hour, I still have no clue. All I want
to do is assign the data in a text cell to a variable, change it (split it
into two names) then put it back in the cell and the adjacent cell. It
should take 30 seconds to write the code, but I can't figure out how to even
get the line assigned to the variable.

There are so many capricious, esoteric ways of addressing a certain part
of the worksheet. When do you use cell?? When do you use cells?? How can you
make a variable refer to a range?? What is a Collection??

I'm sure that there is logic and sense to the way Excel VBA is
constructed, but I just can't see it. To me it seems completely random and
arbitrary. I understand the theory, I think. I understand what methods are
and properties, but there seems to be no concrete advice on how to use them
in actual practice

I just opened my Using VBA book at random. Here's what I see:
range.Borders([Index]) Returns one or all borders in a range. If a range
does not have a border, the returned border object has Linestyle xlNone.

You guys no doubt know what he's talking about, but to me it might as
well be written in Swahili.

Why can't there just be a basic reference that tells a programmer the
basic info he needs to know?? How to assign a cell to a variable. How to
write a variable to a cell. How to use variables to refernce cells. (I don't
believe I have ever - I mean ever - seen an example that does not use this
structu Range("C12:N12") or else R1C1 notation.) Instead we have page
after page of methods with no practical example of how to use them.

I don't care about linestyle or windowdisplayhorizontalscrollbars. I
just want to make simple applications and not fight the nonsense. The
language should be working with the programmer, not against him.

Thanks for letting me vent.

Sam

A man who had lately declared
That property ought to be shared,
Thought it going too far
When they called for his car,
And a list of exceptions prepared.

Thomas Thorneley,
From The Penguin
Book Of Limericks