I know nothing about Visual Basic or programming; where do I start?

Visual Basic is a powerful industry standard language that will allow you to develop custom programs using the features of many (compatible) standard application programs, such as Microsoft's office programs (Word, Excel, Access, etc.), and of course Statistica. Depending on your aspirations as a programmer, you may want to pursue a more systematic approach to learn the language or start by modifying ready examples, to suit your particular needs.

  1. Learning Visual Basic - "becoming an expert." If you want to learn systematically about the Visual Basic language from the ground up, so to speak, we would recommend that you begin by studying a general introductory book or course on the subject. You will find in your local bookstore entire bookshelves filled with books on Visual Basic; also, your local college or university will most likely offer introductory courses on this language. Such courses are very useful because they will allow you to familiarize yourself with basic programming concepts, and how to take advantage of many features of the language to build truly sophisticated custom applications.
  2. Learning by examples and from recorded macros - "using SVB occasionally." If you have had some exposure to programming in Visual Basic or other languages, you will find many of the features of Statistica Visual Basic very familiar. You may want to read this documentation, try the numerous examples that illustrate various features of the language, and modify them to suit your needs. By running various interactive analyses, and recording them into Statistica Visual Basic program macros (see How can I record my analysis in an SVB program?), you will quickly gain a working knowledge of the Statistica object model (see What is meant by the term "object model?"); also, much of the program code that is often needed can be generated by recording macro programs, and combining them into sophisticated custom applications.
  3. Editing recorded macros - "no experience necessary..." Finally, if currently all your applications for Statistica Visual Basic are limited to occasionally rerunning analyses using different variables or different datasets, then you can simply look into the SVB scripts that are automatically recorded by Statistica when you perform any analysis (see How can I record my analysis in an SVB program?) and identify places where datafile names and variable names are entered. All you need to do is to edit them (or replace with new ones) and run the respective macros. This simple method requires very little knowledge of the Statistica Visual Basic syntax conventions.