new to VBA

[joe2324]

Hello, I need to learn VBA for my job and i've been doing a lot of studying over the last week and I had a few questions. First, I currently work as a reporting analyst using T-SQL and oracle pl/sql and I'm finding that excel VBA is very complicated. I started looking at my longest and most complicated sql queries and they are nothing compared to some of basic VBA scripts I've seen. I'm currently using a book from John Walkenbach which is pretty good for the moment. The main reason I need to learn VBA is i'm moving into an accounting role as an analyst and the job requires lots of VBA work so I need to learn as much as possible.

My question is how long did it take most of you to learn VBA? How come everyone everyone says VBA is so easy to learn when it clearly has a learning curve. Like I said, I find my most complicated SQL queries to be nothing compared to some of the excel vba I've looked at. Hopefully this wont take that long to master.

 

[hiker95]

joe2324,

Welcome to the MrExcel forum.

My question is how long did it take most of you to learn VBA?

It varies, but, how excited are you to learn how to accomplish things at lighting speed?

How come everyone everyone says VBA is so easy to learn when it clearly has a learning curve. Like I said, I find my most complicated SQL queries to be nothing compared to some of the excel vba I've looked at. Hopefully this wont take that long to master.

Just dig in, start small, and check out the last last section of the below link new to VBA And, as your skills increase, try answering posts on sites like:

See the list of training informaiton in my response to your original post at this link:
http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/genera...ons/666592-new-visual-basic-applications.html

Have fun....

 

[xancalagonx]

When I started with VBA I had a simple goal.

How to automatically add todays date into a cell in a column labelled "Last Updated".

Reason for this was because I got tired of having to do so manually (and often forgot), plus I didn't want to flood the cells with functions like =IF.

A great way to learn is of course by doing the 101 courses and the various tutorials.

But I also recommend finding out what you want to do, then simply Google for it and copy/paste code into your VBA, run it using F8 (step by step), see how it works, modify some parts and see what it does differently.

What I know in VBA (granted I am far from a pro) is entirely self learned from google, experimentation and help from some very talented people in these forums if I got stuck.

I use VBA alot for information management and the most basic and useful things to learn in that regard is the For...Next loops and the use of arrays as well as how to handle strings by adding or extracting parts of a string value.

The most important thing is to not just sit down and attempt to memorize all the commands, but rather set yourself a goal and figure out how to solve it. E.g. You want to move one column from one worksheet to another, then compare the cells in that column with another column and delete all the rows where the cell values are different.

Something simple as that to start with, and then expand from there helps alot with figuring out how things work.

Or you just google it starting with "Excel VBA how to copy column" :D