Volunteering to Teach High School Students Advanced Excel and VBA -- Seeking Input!

[pawest]

Hello Advanced Excel and VBA community,
Separate from the typical questions seeking help on this form, I am seeking input. I'm starting up a volunteer program (3 trial sessions) to teach Advanced Excel and VBA. These session will be around 90 minutes and with private high school students apt to the math and sciences. These kids can handle fast pace instruction. I would like to get your opinions on what you think is absolutely necessary to teach.

Here's my very general plan right:

Session 1:

• Introduction to capabilities of Excel
• Using the keyboard/Alt and learning hot keys
• Walking though each section of the ribbon
• Basic finance and math models using Excel functions

Session 2:

• Advanced excel formulas
• Pivot Tables, Handling Flat Files, Possibility of External Data Add-Ins and Solver
• Proper Formatting
• Advanced excel models and handling of reports (relating to my real world work)

Session 3:

• Basic VBA

Any input would be valued. Thanks!

 

[JLGWhiz]

One other thing that would be helpful to beginners is to learn how to diagram their projects. Not just VBA, but using Excel with formulas also. The database layout is very important when they first think of accumulating data. They need to understand what the data may be used for in the future and learn to organize the data so that formulas or VBA can be easily applied to achieve desired results. Of course, this goes hand in hand with understanding how the other part works also. But the point is, just teaching how to construct a formula or develop code will only be as useful as their knowledge in how to organize data.

 

[Rick Rothstein]

IMHO, the most important of all is teaching how to use the help files of both Excel and VBA. 90 percent of the questions asked in this forum can be answered in those files, if the user knew how to use them.

Agreed!

With respect to the VBA help files, in case you are not aware of it yourself, the most effective way to get help on a VBA keyword is to type that word into any code module and, with the text cursor embedded within or next to the word, press F1.

As to teaching VBA itself... the one thing I have always found most useful when I learned a new programming language was to learn what functions, subroutines, objects, methods and properties are available... not to learn the syntax nor usage of each, but rather to just learn that it is there and what is generally does... then, when you need the particular functionality offered by the keyword, you will remember it is available. Syntax and usage for it can come from the help files, but if you don't know a it's available in the language, you will never know to use it in a program you write. I feel that, above all, is critical. They don't use the word "language" in when for referring to a programming language for nothing... functions, subroutines, objects and their methods/properties are like the words of a language and code is like the sentences of that language... if you don't know of a word's existence in a language, you will never be able to write a sentence using it. Of course, there is much too much in VBA to cover everything related to the objects in the Excel VBA model, but exposing the students to the more common ones and directing them to the help files (Help/Microsoft Visual Basic Help from the VBA Editor's menu) for them to study the less common ones would be useful in my opinion.