Four main kinds of Visual Basic exist: this course concentrates on the two 'full versions' of Visual Basic:
- VB versions 1 to 6
- VB.NET (several versions)
but there are also Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and VBScript. Both these versions are subsets of the full version, so each lacks some of the features of the full version - neither is particularly difficult to master but you will have to learn to work within their limitations.
- Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a version of VB that is built in to many important applications such as MS Word and MS Excel. VB programs can run within these programs to give the user great control over how documents interact with their users. If you know what macros are then you can think of VBA scripts as 'super macros'.
- VBScript is a limited version of VB that can be incorporated directly into the HTML code that makes up web pages. This allows the pages to more interactive and dynamic. Click the link above to learn more. VBScript is not the only way that Visual Basic can be used to enhance web pages which are otherwise usually very static and passive... other ways include DHTML and Javascript but they are not described here.