What is VBA?

VBA stands for Visual Basic for Applications and was primarily designed to give you the ability to extend Excel's features. By default, Excel already has a vast amount of tools to help you in the data analysis life cycle. We have already seen a small sample in the previous chapters of this book. The problem of performing repetitive tasks becomes very apparent when you are analyzing data. For example, you may be removing leading spaces constantly in your daily work. So, instead of creating formulas, you can create and write some VBA code and bind it to a keyboard shortcut. The next time you need to remove a leading space from a cell, you can just call the VBA code you wrote and it is instantly done. If it is not clear how VBA can help you, that is okay, as you can continue educating yourself and going through some examples, and then everything will make more sense.