Gain more control over your workflows with VBA and macros.

The most common automation job I see looks like this. Once a month, someone exports data to Excel, cleans it by hand, copies totals into a Word document, and emails it to management. It takes most of their day, and occasionally the numbers are wrong. In VBA that becomes one button: a set of queries aggregates the data, an Access report formats it, Outlook automation sends it, and the whole run finishes in under a minute. The interesting work isn't the happy path. It's handling the month where a source file is missing or a value arrives as text instead of a number, which is exactly where the hand-built process used to fail silently too.

Debugging existing VBA is the other half of this service. Intermittent errors like "Object variable or With block variable not set", type mismatches that only appear on certain records, code that runs fine on your machine but errors on a colleague's. I trace these with logging rather than guesswork: an error handler in each routine writes the procedure name, error number, and the record being processed to a log table, so the next failure tells us exactly where to look. Most "random" errors turn out to be very consistent once the conditions are actually recorded.

Not everything needs VBA. Access macros handle the simple cases well (open a form, run a saved import, requery a list), and they're easier for your own staff to read and adjust later. My rule is macros for glue, VBA for logic: anything involving loops, error handling, or talking to Excel and Outlook gets proper code with comments and a consistent structure. Mixing the two carelessly is how databases end up with logic scattered across forty macros nobody can follow.

Performance work on existing code is its own category. The usual offender is a loop that walks through records one at a time doing something a single update query could do in one pass, sometimes turning a two-second job into a twenty-minute one. Other frequent finds: code that opens and closes the same recordset hundreds of times, and lookups repeated inside a loop when the value never changes. Rewriting these is mechanical once identified, and the speedup is often dramatic enough that people assume the hardware changed.

When the work is handed back, you get a walkthrough of what each routine does and where its settings live. Plenty of my clients make their own small adjustments afterward, and that's by design. Automation that only its author can touch isn't an asset, it's a liability with a deadline.