Automating a series of Microsoft Office tasks

Question

I am currently doing a series of rather mechanistic tasks and hope to automate them so as to free up my time for other more productive purposes.

The series of tasks that I have to do looks something like this:

1. Open up access file.
2. Delete a table called 'data'.
3. Import an excel file into that access file and name the table 'data'.
4. Copy and paste all tables and queries to another excel file, in different sheets but in a same workbook. Then rename some of the sheets.
5. Save and close the excel and access files.

I have to do the above sequence of tasks several times a day for many pairs of access and excel files.

How can I automate such a repetitive process? What programming languages/scripts (like, Visual Basic, Windows Batch Script, etc) do I have to learn and how do I combine these skillsets to make this process simpler?

I am not asking for a solution/code to the aforementioned problem. I want to do it by myself but simply don't know where to begin from.

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) can be used for all of the mentioned tasks. Some of the places you can start learning are:

• Getting Started with VBA in Office 2010
• Home & Learn
• Excel Easy
• Tutorials Point
• Lynda - Up and Running with VBA in Excel (Paid)
• Lynda - Up and Running with VBA in Access (Paid)
• Wise Owl
• Excel VBA Tutor
• Excel-Pratique