Best Resources to learn VBA in

Overview

📘 Best Books

• you may be thinking, we live in world of AI, YouTube , online courses who reads books nowadays
• you’re wrong about this, books are still best way to learn anything new in depth with good foundation for advance stuff
• yes, with AI or YouTube tutorial, you’ll have something working within few hours be they won’t teach you how to think
• Everything you see online on YouTube or in an article is pre performed show. something they have perfected after many years of working. They have already tried out all alternative approaches and fixed all problems or bugs with that code. so, they won’t bumped into any problem with code or software. This also applies to my YouTube channel or blog posts.
• So don’t get wrong idea about your skills after finishing YouTube tutorial or any online courses. They are there to help you getting started. Nothing is going to replace real world problem solving experience.

One more thing I like about books is that they are offline and distraction free. You will not be bombarded with ads, messages, notification or trending videos. This is absolutely necessary for your focus and productivity, on YouTube you may find great video, but you’re just one click away to spend a few hours for shallow entertainment. which you’ll regret next day.

Excel Power Programming with VBA

• I’ve learned excel VBA during my college so have used older version of this book Excel 2013 Power programming by John Walkenbach
• This is good for absolute beginners who know nothing about VBA, still getting used to excel, each and every part of excel VBA is explain in very detailed manner that sometimes it might bore you
• It’s large book to read 700+ pages 🥵, but don’t get scared by this, you don’t need read or understand entire book, just focus on first section : introduction to Excel VBA, this is more than enough to get to started and build your first few projects
• Once you have already few projects under your belt, you can look into remaining sections

Excel VBA Programming for Dummies

• I’ve not read this book in details, but I can vouch for this author John Walkenbach
• First 3 Section of books is good enough to get your started which are
  • Getting started with excel VBA programming
  • How VBA works with excel
  • Programming concepts
• You can focus on later sections once you’ve already built few projects using those basic concepts

Excel Macro Mastery by Paul Kelly

• It’s very practical, small and no-nonsense book
• It’s good for anyone who are really advance user of excel, someone who is using excel since few years in profession life, who understand each of excel object or functionality very well
• Book also explain good deal about programming, which all of VBA Programming books lack like
  • how to write good code
  • how to break down complex problems
  • how to solve error using debugging
• This books might be bit more difficult for beginners

▶️ Best YouTube Channels

Excel Macro Mastery

• This channel is managed by Paul Kelly, He is Microsoft MVP and can be great help when it’s come to VBA
• He has best content on YouTube when it’s come to VBA. He also offers paid course in form of book, but YouTube content is more than enough for most people

VBA A2Z

• I don’t know person who manage this channel, he seems to be bit more private to share any personal info
• This channel contains lot of projects tutorial related to excel VBA programming
• you can just do entire project side by side while watching his tutorials
• keep in mind that some of project might be too advance specially if you’re not from IT/Computer background

🌐 Best online resources

Reddit VBA

• Great community to ask your queries related to VBA
• learn about how other people are using VBA
• take part in discussion related to VBA about new articles, updates, books, YouTube tutorials, courses

Stack Overflow

• After availability of AI tools this seems bit old school but still there’s are thousands of discussions or questions related to VBA
• In programming most of time there’s multiple way to do same stuff, or finding out alternative or simplified method to do task
• It’s about finding best solution for your projects and for that why it’s important to visit this website where group of users provide their method to do given task and explain about their thinking process why they like their approach better

🤖 AI Tools

• Not going to write separate details about each tool in this category because they are still quite new and evolving rapidly. so, I am going to talk about all chat based AI tools in general Chat GPT, Copilot or any other popular tool available in market
• Don’t use it as your primary sources of learning material, combine it with other resource like book or tutorial
• they are great to speed up your learning by
  • giving you real time answers about your queries and questions
  • you don’t have to shy about your dumb questions, you can ask it whatever comes to your mind
  • find out alternative method to do same tasks
  • suggestion for improvement over your existing code
  • generate generalized functions or small code snippets which you can reused
  • simplify your existing code so it’s easier to read or understand after few years

Conclusion

• My advice is pick a good book to learn everything in proper sequence with good foundation for basics
• Once you have good basics then you can try out building few more projects from YouTube or explore someone else projects
• If you’re building your own project then focus on building first working version, you don’t have to use best method or best coding practice
• Use AI tools to speed up your learning, don’t generate entire projects code using AI, you need code that you can fix, improve and maintain for long time