In my computer programming class, we have been learning to program in Visual Basic. I’m not sure how much it is used in real life but I’m trying to connect a VB program to excel. I wrote the code based off of a video I found on youtube. I know very little about computer programming but you can only learn by failing and figuring it out. The road block I hit is not knowing what my Oledb provider is. How do I find my oledb provider? Thanks
Disclaimer: I’m not familiar with VB or Oledb.
First, are you hoping to actually “connect” your program to Excel? As in modify the Excel program and/or send messages to it? ** If so, just ignore this post.**
If you are trying to import or create Excel files though I can reccomend the library EPPlus. It is a .net library that lets you create a “Spreadsheet” object in memory (or open a saved one), populate it fairly robustly, and save it to disk. There is alot a good deal of support for it online.
If that isn’t what you were looking to do then, uh, sorry. Useless post 
Basically, In my form, i will have multiple text boxes and basically, I have already created an excel file with column names. I have textboxes with corresponding names and basically, every time I hit the “save” button, it is suppose to add the data from the text boxes to the correct cell in the excel file
It would be much easier to do with: VisualBASIC for Applications which is the macro language for Microsoft Office. You can make forms in there as well. That has plenty of use just about anywhere Office is.
I can dig up the OLE stuff maybe tomorrow I have not used my VisualBASIC 6 license like this in a while.
What is the difference between using Visual Basic Express like I use and Visual Basic for Applications? Or are we talking about the same Visual Basic?
VBA pretty much is VB6 with all the Office object model exposed. Modern VisualBASIC has different syntax but shares the form design concepts. Microsoft for some reason made a break from VB6 syntax and in the process pretty much killed a large portion of their community. RealBASIC which became Xojo picked up the syntax as a way to attract developers.
VBA also happens to work with some CAD software so there is extra value there.
In my experience, exporting small data sets to an excel file is frequently done to allow end users to quickly view, sort and display their data.
As data becomes easier to collect and cheaper to store, new ways will be found to help end users organize and display data. Tableau, a FIRST sponsor is one of the companies leading this data display evolution. They have a program that does this and they offer free licenses in the KoP. Many teams find it helpful for organizing scouting data.
You can also use Excel to accept user input and store the data in a VB file. This was more critical in early 2000 when HTML form tools were limited and there was more paper to digital interactions. More frequently forms are created in HTML with JavaScript entry validation and then sent to a server for storage.
If you are willing to jump to VBA, it could be a great tool for what you are looking to do. On the other hand, if you are looking to stretch your legs a bit with regular VB, I whole heatedly recommend EPPlus.
In your VB program you would have your Save button event read in all the text box values, update your EPPlus ExcelWorksheet object, then call the ExcelWorksheet.Save() function to write it to disk. You can even load the column names from the Excel file directly into your program by importing the file and just accessing the specific cells.
Here are some good examples:
http://www.jimmycollins.org/blog/?p=547
And I can send you my own example if you like.
There’s a pretty good example of OLE from an older page at Microsoft:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/242243
With VB.NET (VisualBASIC Express) you should probably try this which basically wraps the OLE functionality with ADO:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms971514.aspx
The long and (maybe not so) fascinating backstory of ODBC->OLE->ADO:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810287.aspx
…
BASIC was the language I learned 3rd after assembly language and Forth.
If you really like BASIC I recommend looking at some of these:
PureBASIC’s extensive library - $100 and upgrades for life
Write PureBASIC get JavaScript for web applications
Write BASIC get JAVA for mobile devices
DarkBASIC is oriented towards game design work
A very QuickBASIC ™ like language for console applications
QuickBASIC was the predecessor of VisualBASIC for DOS and VisualBASIC for Windows.
A BASICStamp™ like language targeting Microchip PIC microcontrollers
A BASIC language targeting AVR microcontrollers
Yet another BASIC language targeting 8015, ARM, AVR, FT90x & PIC microcontrollers
What the heck is the FT90x you ask:
FT90x
There are many others. These are just a few I own and use from time to time.
Just out of curiousity, how different is the language from VB to VBA
Differences from VB.NET to VB6 (which is basically VBA)
Pay careful attention to the notes about:
“A common problem when migrating VBA code to Visual Basic is ambiguous references. If the Visual Basic compiler cannot figure out where to find the value for a variable, you need to help the compiler resolve (or disambiguate) the reference. This is discussed in the example in this tip.”
This can cause some fun and interesting problems when ignored.
Please note that some of the newer features of VB.NET could have been added to VB6.
For example with different syntax some features make an appearance in VBA7 which started with Office 2010 64bit:
There’s a good way to check if you have 64bit VBA7 on this page
I know that when the 64bit version of Microsoft Office first shipped some operations took much longer to complete.
I had a massive spreadsheet used for QA at a semiconductor company.
It grew so large it needed the 64bit version and the calculation payload went from 17 minutes to 2 hours for the same code.
I’m not too familiar with the specific differences, though I don’t think they would be too large. I think in both these approaches you will have to use a data structure in your program to store all of your cells and data and whatnot. They you will have to save it to disk somewhere. Personally I think it would be easier to use the EPPlus library and work withing the VB framework that you already know. But, as I said, I’m not familiar with VBA so I don’t know how different it is, or how create an Excel file works in it. You will have to use some googling to figure out which one looks best from your perspective.