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Before you laugh at me using an outdated language, I only chose it because a co worker suggested learning it, and we do use some VBA coded macros in our spreadsheets.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 taught myself VBA when I inherited a job that involved taking data from multiple sources and producing summary reports of various types for multiple stakeholders. The person before me spent days each week doing it, it took me about a week of learning and playing to bring that down to 5 minutes or so.
I found VBA useful for dealing with administrivia.
I ended up doing similar things multiple times afterwards, with variations on source data (excel, text files, word docs), source data location (local drive, network, databases, SharePoint) and output (pivots, charts, tables, text files, email, word docs, etc.) depending on what was needed. Someone else mentioned data validation already.
Automate the boring stuff.