Overview
This
is a one-hour course that is intended for Excel users who want to learn
how to automate their tasks. Excel, as well as other
Microsoft Office
programs, come with a powerful scripting language known as VBA. With a
little bit of programming knowledge, complex tasks can be fully
automated and completed in seconds. This course assumes no programming
experience; only a reasonable level of familiarity with Excel.
Prerequisites
Microsoft Excel
: This courses uses
Excel 2007
for the demonstrations, and comes with
.xlsm files for the code examples. These demos and files will be
compatible with later versions of Excel as well. If you are using Excel
2003, you will not be able to open the .xlsm files, but you will be able
to follow along with the demos.
What you will learn
The
course begins with an introduction to macros. You will learn how to
record a sequence of actions, how to run the recorded macro, and how to
inspect the VBA code that gets generated from this process.
You
will then learn how to use numbers in VBA. There are different types of
numbers which are used in different situation, so you'll be a given an
overview of the differences between them. You will be shown how to do
simple arithmetic operations inside your VBA code.
You
will then be introduced to strings.
Strings
are used in programming to
represents words and characters. For example, "hello world" could be
stored in your VBA code as a string. You could then perform various
operations on your string, such as converting it to upper-case,
replacing a word, counting the number of characters, and many others.
Then
you will look at booleans, if-statements and loops. These concepts will
allow you to create complex behaviors that would not have been possible
by simply
recording a macro
. You will able to write code that
implements logical rules and makes decisions.
Ranges
and
Worksheets
will be introduced next. These objects are what will
allow you to read and manipulate your Excel data from your VBA code. We
will then move on to subs and functions. These will allow you to
organize your code into small, cohesive pieces, making it easier to
reason about complex tasks.
Finally, we will end the
course with a simple, practical exercise. We will take a list of phone
numbers that are in inconsistent formats, and write some code that will
convert them into a standard format at the press of a button.
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