Programming and Data Wrangling with VBA and Excel

Course Specifications

Course Number: ELK91–158_rev1.1

Course Length: 3 days

Course Description

VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) enables you to enhance and extend the capabilities of Microsoft® Excel® and other applications in the Microsoft® Office application suite. You can use VBA to perform tasks that would be difficult or impossible to do using only worksheet functions, and you can automate a wide range of tasks involving the collection, processing, analysis, and visualization of data. This course will give you a good foundation for understanding, creating, and using VBA in your own Excel workbooks, show you how to work with data across different applications, and how to package the macros and functions you create so you can back them up, move them to other computers, and share them with other users.

Course Objective: In this course, you will develop and deploy VBA modules to solve business problems.

You will:

• Identify general components of VBA and their appropriate use in solving business solutions.
• Record VBA macros to automate repetitive tasks.
• Use reference tools built into Excel to get help on VBA programming language and objects used in the Excel VBA environment.
• Write VBA code to create a custom worksheet function.
• Eliminate, avoid, or handle errors in VBA code, and optimize its performance.
• Control how and when macros run.
• Develop UserForm objects to create custom dialog boxes and windows.
• Use VBA to read and write data from local files and cloud services.
• Use VBA to clean and transform data.
• Run programs and commands outside of Excel and share VBA projects with other users.

Target Student: This course is primarily designed for students who want to gain the skills necessary to use VBA to automate tasks in Excel such as collecting data from external sources, cleaning, and manipulating data. The target student may also want to learn how to create custom worksheet functions to streamline worksheet formulas and make complex worksheets easier to support, maintain, and understand.

Prerequisites: To ensure your success in this course, you should be an experienced Excel user who is comfortable creating and working with Excel workbooks, including tasks such as entering worksheet formulas, using absolute and relative addressing, formatting cells, and creating pivot tables and charts. This level of skill could be acquired by taking the Microsoft Excel for Office 365™ (Desktop or Online) courses, Parts 1, 2, and 3.

Hardware Requirements

For this course, you will need one computer for each student and one for the instructor. Each computer will need the following minimum hardware configurations:

• 1 GHz 64-bit processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 25 GB available disk space
• DirectX 10 graphics card and a 1,024 × 576 or higher resolution monitor (1,024 × 768 resolution or higher monitor recommended)
• Keyboard and mouse (or other pointing device)
• Network cards and cabling for local network access
• Internet access (contact your local network administrator)
• Projection system to display the instructor's computer screen

Software Requirements

• Microsoft® Windows® 10 Professional or Enterprise
• Microsoft® Office 2019 or Office 365™

Course Content

Lesson 1: Using VBA to Solve Business Problems

Lesson 2: Automating Repetitive Tasks

Lesson 3: Getting Help on VBA

Lesson 4: Creating Custom Worksheet Functions

Lesson 5: Improving Your VBA Code

Lesson 6: Controlling How and When Macros Run

Lesson 7: Developing Custom Forms

Lesson 8: Using VBA to Work with Files

Lesson 9: Using VBA to Clean and Transform Data

Lesson 10: Extending the Programming Environment Beyond the Workbook