Rapid Application Development / Advanced Excel Development

VBA Best Practice

There is a lot of information floating around about how to get various things done in VBA, how to make the best use, or sometimes just the most use of VBA and Excel.
This section aims to add an element of Quality and Best Practices. These are just general guidelines, a professional developer will always assess the options and make the appropriate choice in their specific situation.
These suggestions are specific to Excel VBA in commercial settings, many will not translate to other technologies or other settings.

VBA Best Practice Series

Documentation

• If you design for simplicity only very minor additional documentation is needed
• Design and build the user Interface with the Users needs primary, the documentation will automatically be there
• Design and build the business logic parts with the maintainers needs primary, the main documentation will automatically be there, expand as required.
• Integral tests should explicitly clarify intent.
• Reports should contain enough description to be meaningful.
• External documentation is almost always so out of date its worse than useless.
• Excessive documentation is too hard to plod through
• Poorly targeted documentation is pointless
• Working software is more useful than documentation
• Sometimes documentation is important