Office supports Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a development language. Some users never need VBA, but most of us at least dabble with it a bit. VBA offers a number of built-in functions and knowing which one to use can be a chore for anyone new to development. Fortunately, there’s good help available:

  1. In the Visual Basic Editor (VBE), choose Microsoft Visual Basic from the Help menu.
  2. In the resulting Help task pane, click the Microsoft Visual Basic Documentation link to display a list of subjects.
  3. Click the Functions or Statements link to display a graduated alpha listing.

Being familiar with the available functions—and there are many—is vital to working efficiently with VBA. Now, you might be wondering whether you need a function or a statement. While we often use the terms interchangeably, they really aren’t. Statements have been around since the beginning. Never versions have replaced statements with VBA functions. For that reason, always use a function if possible. They have the most up-to-date functionality. There may be a similar statement, but don’t use it. Office supports them only for backward compatibility. They could disappear from a future version, without notice.