Learning about Microsoft Excel VBA training classes, courses and seminars will be the first step necessary in order to take advantage of the quality training available when it comes to MS Excel and Visual Basic for Applications. Many people mistakenly assume that Excel is nothing more than a kind of high speed calculator, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

There are other people out there who mistakenly believe that — in addition to being a calculator — Excel is only good for tables, images, spreadsheets and text. It’s true that the program can do all of those things, which are extremely basic, but it is capable of much, much more.

Once one begins to explore the features and a more in-depth fashion — which can be gained through Excel VBA training — one begins to see the truly complex calculations and charts that can be created to illustrate just about any type of data under the sun. There are a multitude of features within the program that most people never find, sadly.

For those who want to learn more about MS Excel and how to put it to its highest and most complex use, some sort of training course or seminar will be necessary. This doesn’t mean that you need to be a programming genius or some sort of software designer, because you don’t. Rather, you only need to be familiar with the basics of MS Excel in order to go forward.

This is why it can be a good idea to head to the Internet and begin searching for a quality training course that will follow a logical progression. This means that it will take you from the basics of VBA and then eventually show you how you can use every feature within VBA to command not only Excel but MS Word and PowerPoint right from Excel. There are a number of two-day workshops around the country that teach this.

As a way to learn how to take full advantage of Visual Basic for Applications, Microsoft Excel VBA training courses are probably the way to go. It’s a fact that most users of MS Excel never come remotely close to taking advantage of all of the built-in features and capabilities of the program. Take a course and learn how to supercharge MS Excel with VBA the right way.

The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with OnSiteTrainingCourses.Com, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel Classes in London and throughout the UK.

Whenever you use the Copy and Paste commands in Microsoft Excel, it is not just the cell data that is copied; the formatting, style and number formats are also copied. The Paste Special command allows you to be selective about what you are pasting. The Paste Special command can be used to import elements from other programs into Excel using Windows Object Linking and Embedding. When doing so, the option “Paste Link” can be used to create a link to the original data rather than pasting in a copy of it.

If you are copying and pasting data purely within an Excel spreadsheet, the Paste Special command offers a set of options which are unique to the Excel environment. Interestingly enough, the Paste Special command is only available if the Excel data is copied rather than cut. Note also that it is often useful to paste over the original data, using the options in the Paste Special dialog to transform the original data in some way. Let’s now look at the key options which are available when using the Paste Special command.

If the radio button labelled “All” is chosen, Excel will paste all the data on the clipboard in much the same way as it would do if the ordinary Paste command had been used.

Choosing “Formulas” causes Excel to ignore any cell formatting and paste only the data contained in the cells being copied. (The term “formulas” is used in a broad sense here and does not imply that Excel will only copy cells that contain formulas.)

I personally find the “Values” option particularly useful: it can be used to “freeze” dynamic data. Like the “Formulas” option, “Values” causes Excel to paste only data and ignore formatting. The key distinction is that if the copied cell contains a formula, Excel will paste the calculated result of the formula rather than the formula itself.

The “Formats” option is a bit like using the Format Painter tool. It pastes the formatting from the copied cells but does not paste any data.

As you can probably guess, the “Comments” options copies only comments that were in the source range, ignoring all other data.

Similarly, the “Validation” option will copy only cells that have had validation rules applied to them.

Hopefully, this has given you an idea of how the Paste Special command works. I’ll just mention one final option: “Transpose”. This option reverses the orientation of the original data, so that rows become columns and vice versa.