Sometimes it may be not enough of the XL Report Builder possibilities to create a report. In such cases you can use advantages of the VBA. This office-programming tool is probably the most powerful among such systems. Using VBA in the reports, the user gets all the power of the Microsoft Excel.

To use VBA macros at the report creation in the XL Report Builder it’s necessary to use the properties Macro Before Build and Macro After Build of the object Report. These properties are for calling of the published VBA procedures. Their string values must contain full names of the published VBA procedures, which are saved together with the workbook-template.

At creation of the workbook-template it is necessary to add a new module into it and then to write a public-procedure into this module. Then, in one of the properties Macro Before Build or Macro After Build you need to enter name of this module, put a dot and write the name of this procedure (for example: "Module1.Procedure1").

The procedure, specified in the property Macro Before Build will be started immediately BEFORE the report execution. It can contain a code, which performs some actions of creating or editing of the template. There can also be a dialog with the user, where some details of the report can be specified.

Procedure, specified in the property Macro After Build will be automatically started immediately AFTER the report building. It can be very useful if there is a necessity of the additional work with the information (after it had been extracted from the database), for example to filter it, to build a chart, to mark some values with the color and so on. An these are not all situations, when you can use macros. It is possible to do everything you wish using macros (namely, everything, VBA and Excel are capable of). And they can do a lot of things.

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