What you'll learn

In this course, you'll learn to write programs in the language Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). VBA is part of Word, Access, PowerPoint, and other MS software. We'll just be using it with Excel.

VBA is used in business to:

  • Automate routine business tasks, e.g., read sales data from a database, import it into Excel, and do some analysis for the monthly sales report. Having a VBA program do the work means that you don't have to.
  • Analyzing data sets, looking for trends, unusual events, etc.

The second one is data analytics. Excel is one of the most widely used tools for this work. People with these skills are in demand.

If you plan on working in MIS (management information systems), these are the sort of tasks you'll be doing.

Apart from learning Excel VBA, you'll also learn to think like a programmer. Programmers look at tasks in a certain way. They break them into pieces, describe the pieces, work out how the pieces fit together. That skill is called decomposition. Decomp is important no matter what programming language you use.

The course is hands-on. That means exercises. Do them! Or you won't learn much.

Exercises are the way

Seriously, do the exercises. For realsies.