The Developer Tab
When you first open Excel, the Developer tab is disabled because the majority of Excel users never need
it. To enable the Developer tab, you can go to File > Options. Then, in the Excel Options dialog, select the
Customize Ribbon tab and check the Developer checkbox in the Main Tabs section on the right. This book
doesn’t delve into programming, but the Developer tab is worth introducing so that you’re aware of it.
Within each Office application resides a powerful application-specific programming language called Visual
Basic for Applications (VBA). VBA, which is a subset of the Visual Basic program language that many profes-
sional programmers use to write applications, allows you to harness the power of programming code to
automate tasks in Excel. Any repetitive task you perform in Excel (and other Office applications) can be auto-
mated so that the program does the work for you. A common example is automatically customizing a report
for different people and then sending those various versions of the report through Outlook with the click of a
button. To ensure that you don’t have to be a computer programmer to work with VBA, Microsoft has includ-
ed a tool called the Macro Recorder on the Developer tab. All you need to do is record a macro in Excel, and
when you play it back, the actions recorded in the macro are repeated exactly as you performed them.
The Developer tab consists of the following groups:
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