Alright, so I’ll get laughed at here, but one of my ‘goals’ for work this year is I wanted to take the 4 hour VBA course on youtube and then write a small program after it that does something.
Before you laugh at me using an outdated language, I only chose it because a co worker suggested learning it, and we do use some VBA coded macros in our spreadsheets. We’re not a very up to date company.
The reason I never get anything done with learning programming is I never know what to do . And if I do come up with something to do, it will be WAYY too complex over my head, i’ll fail at it, then never touch it again. If it’s too simple, I won’t even want to bother. (Yay ADHD)
So I’m just looking for a couple suggestions for a fun little program to make (and consider the goal ‘done’). I know calculators of some sort are an option…I can’t really think of anything else. I guess it doesn’t actually have to be a useful program but it would be cool if it was.
I wrote some VBA for a job a long time ago. It was pretty good for making quick and dirty UI in Excel – like, click a cell and have it pop up a form you can interact with that will let you do data entry with less clicks/typing than whatever Excel would’ve made you do if you had to do it naively.
I used it for showing a list that could be filtered down by partially typing in text in one project. (A really basic autocomplete sort of thing, essentially.) For another project, I integrated IE and showed some complex data in the embedded browser with buttons (or maybe it was checkboxes? been too many years) in the form to quickly classify it and move on to the next entry without having to flip back and forth between multiple programs and manually open files. (Each entry corresponded to a row and widgets on the form updated values in various columns so I could go through all the data and fill out the full spreadsheet super fast.)
Alternatively, write a script that checks your spreadsheet for errors. e.g. add a reference to a regex library and use it verify that all the entries in a column match the data format you expect (like serial number patterns with hyphens in specific places).
You can also ask your coworkers for something tedious they have to do a lot in Excel and see if you can find a way to make it less tedious.