Why everyone could use VBA and how to teach yourself for free!

Posted: 13 Nov 2020
Author: Veronica White

The other day I found myself championing Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). VBA is such an amazing tool to learn because as long as a computer has Microsoft Word or Excel installed on it, you can use it. Any business can benefit from incorporating some VBA code or form and I have utilized it in almost all of my past internships (the only one that didn’t utilize it was because it was using python and other languages to manage their data files.) I hope you find this post inspiring to find a use of VBA in your day-to-day work as the applications of VBA are endless! Also feel free to reach out if you’re having VBA issues you’d like some help with.

How have I used VBA in the past? In my first internship at Lennox International, I created a macro to help me enter mind-numbing weekly safety reports into a spreadsheet faster. When I worked at Shure Incorporated, the team avidly use VBA to do a variety of things: parse through data files exported from various devices, create weekly reports and graphs, rerun data analyses etc. During my undergraduate research experience I created a VBA macro that generated labels for farmers to print out on a QL-700 Brother label printer. In another case, I wrote some VBA code for a friend that helped them reformat the data that came from their GPS tool that reformatted the data in a way that ArcGIS could input the data. It took me a couple hours and saved my friend tens of hours of repetitive copying and pasting data into the format they needed. Additionally, when in need of some help with project planning for Randomized Control Trial that recruited multiple organizations, I created some VBA code that made a PERT flowchart based on steps in a project implementation to help identify bottlenecks. None of these implementations are perfect, but they show case some different uses of VBA then you might be used to.

Below is a list of resources to help you start or enhance your VBA knowledge. I will continue to add to the following list as I come across other great free VBA resources, feel free to send me a message to help this list grow!

Step-by-step instructions: -Setting up VBA for the first time

Here are a list of free courses to work through:

• codewithvba.com has three free courses (Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced). This is a great refresher regardless of your experience level.
• Excel Easy has 16 chapters that go through various VBA topics.
• YouTube Platlist by Tiger Solutions has over 71 videos of tutorials and examples

Free external exercises and examples to practice your skills:

• Examples: Excel Easy. Excel Easy has a over 30 examples of VBA walkthroughs. They also have walkthroughs on other helpful Excel features such as functions and pivot tables.
• YouTube Playlist walkthrough: Creating the game Hangman

Free VBA Cheat sheets:

• codewithvba.com Has one general one and one on working with strings.