How To Start An Excel VBA Macro (Real-World VBA Task S3 P1)
The first video covers an important but often overlooked topic for Excel VBA beginners: planning and conceptualization of Excel VBA macros. Perhaps it’s not something you’ve thought of so far in your VBA career. Put it this way, if you were building a house, would you try to do it without plans? That would be insane! I find a house is a great analogy for a spreadsheet application: in many ‘houses’ I’ve worked on, the kitchen is at the bottom of the garden and excessive plumbing / wiring is required to get it all working! It’s a result of a lack of planning.
In the session, I show you my tried-and-tested approach to starting a VBA task the right way. First, we form an idea of where we’re trying to get to – what should the final analysis look like? Let’s start with the end in mind. Then, we enter the ‘general translation’ phase: in a broad sense, what do we have to do here (eg. loop through the weekend’s fixtures), and what techniques might help? Finally, and the highest level of detail, we create ‘pseudo code’ in English (or your native language) that acts as a blueprint for the macro we’ll build. Yes, with this approach, it’s simply a case of converting these instructions, one-by-one, from real-world language to VBA. At least it sounds simple …
Make sure you download the file and work along with me. Do you plan your Excel VBA macros in this way? Let me know in the YouTube comments and I can’t wait to see you in the second video in the series.
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In the Real-World VBA Task series, we tackle a VBA challenge similar to the jobs that professionals you like are trying to automate daily using Excel VBA.
In Season 3 of the Excel VBA Real-World Task series, we explore a job I’ve been tasked with many times in my career: creating form analysis for football teams in a league table. Form analysis the kind of thing you’ll see alongside football league tables in the newspaper or online, and it’s the perfect topic for this series for two reasons. First, it’s a task that’s not easily done in Excel without using VBA (though it’s possible using a series of very long formulae). Second, it requires powerful techniques such as loops, conditional statements, position control and more – so it’s broadly applicable to VBA tasks generally. In other words, the series should help whatever VBA job you’re currently wrestling with.
In this 7-part season, I walk you through the VBA task step-by-step, from the critical planning and conceptualization phase, to application of loops, variables and more in VBA, through to combining techniques together to create a powerful ‘click-of-button’ solution. Even I was surprised by how quickly this macro gets the job done …
It’s about more than impressing you with individual techniques such as loops in Excel VBA, however. It’s about learning an overall approach to VBA development that you can apply in your work. Look out for the Excel ‘Metaskills’ such as debugging that I showcase during the series – they really are the hidden gems in Excel learning. I hope enjoy the series and do let me know in the YouTube comments how you get on.
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