Reddit reviews Excel 2010 Power Programming with VBA

Let's look at it from another angle. What are you going to be doing with Excel?

My experience is that it's all about the Data Process. You have to clean it up. Check the minimum values, maximum values, date ranges, see that different fields are what you want. Half your SSNs are text and half are numbers? How do you deal with that?

Do you have all the information needed for the statistical analysis you want to do?

Your client claims this list of people have been paid out this much. Here's a list of actual benefit payments from their bank trust. Compare them and explain the differences.

For added fun, the bank trust gave you benefit payment information as pdf files. Turn them into excel and find some way to connect them to each participant.

May be worthwhile to simply research the data process and build from there. Much of the actual learning comes from working with others and paying attention to the tricks and hotkeys they're using. Every single candidate puts 'proficient in Excel' on their resume. Telling a story about something done with it is usually better.

Hell. Research Beersheets for fantasy football, rip it apart and see how it ticks. Apply lessons learned to another sport.

Burning through this there are certain things you run into often.

VLOOKUPS. COUNTIF. Filters. DATE. TEXT. MATCH. Grouping. VALUE. General practices such as color-code inputs. Center Across Area rather than Merge Cells.

alt+e+s in sequence to bring up special paste options. (alt+e+s+v for paste values and alt+e+s+t for paste formats are super common. paste transpose exists.)

There's got to be some online site to offer services for pay. I'd be shocked if there's not someplace to offer data cleanup.

Really want to go to the next level? Dive into VBA. The go to is Excel 2010 Power Programming with VBA. Read through a section, do all the examples, come back then try to do them all again without guidance. This gives insight into a lot of what goes on behind the scenes in Excel, teaches many hotkeys you wouldn't otherwise pick up on. The moment I discovered how to access the Immediate window (ctrl+G) then learned to throw a Print command or two into my coding to test values in the VBA editor was the key moment I connected my programming in VBA to what I had done in R, Matlab, C, or Python.

In college is an excellent time, because you have time. It doesn't seem like it now, but time is hard to find afterward as well.

With VBA, I think it would be very boring and hard to learn out of a book. Really the best way to learn is to have a simple task in Excel that you can automate with VBA. Then as you do more and more your knowledge grows organically. If that's not possible, I learned a lot from this book. Or you can get the updated 2016 version.

For SQL, I mostly use W3Schools when I forget some syntax, so that might be a good place to start.

I would highly recommend power programming with vba. Exceptional reference. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0470475358/ref=s9_simh_gw_d0_g14_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=mobile-1&pf_rd_r=09S70XW4XDWY2BC2JT9K&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=2068141862&pf_rd_i=mobile.

For VBA, I cannot recommend any of the books by Walkenbach highly enough, such as: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Excel-Power-Programming-Spreadsheets-Bookshelf/dp/0470475358/ref=la_B000APG96Y_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406291315&sr=1-5

personally, i've really enjoyed Power Programming with VBA by John Walkenbach. It is very elementary, with lots of examples and a disc included. If you are a total noob (like me) and want to speed up repetitive BS at work, this isn't a bad one to pick up.