She got hooked on programming while writing Lotus 1-2-3 macros. Later she added WordBasic macros to her repertoire. From there it was an easy step to Visual Basic for Applications in the latest version of Microsoft Excel. Recently someone told her that if she knew Visual Basic for Applications, she automatically knew Visual Basic. She tried it; she likes it.
Karin is writing a front-end application that puts a friendly interface on Microsoft Word for Windows, Microsoft Excel, and Visio. Most of the Excel samples use Variant, so she acquired that habit. She declares every variable with Dim, but she doesn’t give a data type, relying on the default Variant type instead. Last week she spent two late nights debugging a program that was getting random values in one of the variables. As it turned out, she had misspelled a variable name. Karin was surprised that Basic would let her do that. One of her colleagues explained Option Explicit. The whole idea sounded kind of weird, but she hasn’t had any trouble since she started using it.
Her colleague is trying to persuade her to use integers rather than variants as loop counters. She understands the concept, but it seems like a lot of trouble, and she doubts it would make a noticeable difference in her programs.