Excel 3: Macros and VBA Workshop (December 9)

I attended a 2 hour workshop about Excel, which was organized by DOIT STS. This session is actually a continuation of the two previous sessions, Excel 1 and Excel 2. The specific topics being discussed in this session are using macros and programming using VBA in Excel. I had a decent amount of experience with Excel before attending the session, but I have never tried to program in Excel. What is nice about these sessions is that participants can use an individually designated computer and follow along the steps taken by the facilitator. This enables the participants to experience hands on learning, which I think is really helpful to help retain the skills gained through this training session. The facilitator gives us an opportunity to solve a real life problem. The problem was assigning grades to each of the students in a class based on certain preset criteria. What we need to do was to write a program that can process each individual’s grade components and give out his or her final grade for the course. We started writing the code piece by piece and step by step. I thought the facilitator did a great job in explaining the logic behind each part of the code. After her helpful explanations, I was able to understand the inner-workings of the course grading program. Through this training session, I also learned and applied the most common programming concepts like the while loop and conditional statements. Overall, I was glad to be able to attend this training session and would recommend it to my fellow classmates.