Your Input Here: VBA Course Practical Projects

Hi guys!

I want to give you an update on where I am with the VBA Course and get your input and feedback!

Course Progress

I have finished making the core part of the course, teaching you all of the things that you need to know to be a very good VBA/Macro programmer, but now I am working to add useful practical tutorials for each main section and to bring the course together in a way that makes learning the concepts easy and real-world-applicable.

Currently, there are over 100 tutorials finished and uploaded, so the course will be a large course that will take you from knowing nothing about VBA to being able to do just about anything that you want.

Your Input Here

Each main section of the course will have a Practical Tutorial or Task at the end of it that brings together the concepts learned in that section, but I will also have bigger Core Projects in the course that will each be in their own separate sections and that will be used to make much larger and more useful workbooks.

One of the most important things in the course will be these Core Projects that bring everything together to create something useful in the real-world and this is where I want to get your input.

My thoughts on project topics:

  1. First Core Project: Easy template creation and worksheet formatting.
  2. Second Core Project: Import/export project with data visulaization and maybe email attachments.
  3. Third Core Project: Adding event-based macros, having a login-based system, create and manage tasks and other business-related items, as well as userform integration and integration of the content from the previous practical tutorials.

I’d love to get your feedback on what you think should be in the Core Projects or if I should have fewer or more Core Projects. Go ahead and leave your thoughts in the comments section below!

Thanks for your input!

Don

27 Responses

  1. Wayne says:

    I am looking for best practices to use in my project. I have a “weekly’ spread sheet with a list of tasks for next week. I am clicking a button to move the tasks to the ” daily” sheet and putting them on the correct day. opening and closing books, going to correct sheet. Also looking for clarification of VBA vs Macro’s. Which, When, and Why. Thanks

    • don says:

      Thanks for the input! I think a Task Manager type module might work well then in the final project. I am also thinking to showcase a powerful way to store things like tasks as raw data, like it would be in a real database, but I think I might be going a bit too far for the course in that regard. In my notes for this course, there are now more things that I couldn’t include than the other way around so its great to get input on what matters most.

  2. Peter says:

    It may be prudent to do no more than 3 projects initially, but your emphasis should be on a step by step explanation on why and how these are used to complete the final project. it will be easier to grasp concepts and understand (getting the basics right) which may be expanded in later projects.

    • don says:

      I might not have been as clear on this as I should have, but I am making smaller “mini-projects” or practical tasks at the end of each main section and the goal of those is to bring concepts together to do something useful with the new things that were learned in that section. But the 3 main projects will each have their own sections and bring together many concepts to teach you how to make more useful workbooks. The final project of the main projects will serve as the big guy that incorporates everything that was taught in the course. The concepts that are used in programming will stay the same for the main projects, I just wanted to get input on the types of things that people would find most useful to learn in the main projects.

      To sum up, each core section of the course will have a “mini” Practical Tutorial or task and the entire course will have 3 (or 4) separate big projects, each in their own section.

    • don says:

      I just updated this post to be more clear about the structure of the projects, sorry for any confusion.

  3. Sharon says:

    Hi Don! Love your videos! I like the idea of data visualization for the second project and my main thing for that would be to make it easy for me to learn how to easily get my csv data into a worksheet and looking nice without me having to fiddle about for an hour every time I import something. I’m sure the other stuff will be great for me to learn also, but this is my main concern for now. Thanks!

    • don says:

      Thanks for the input Sharon! Data manipulation and presentation will have a big focus throughout the projects and tasks in the course and you will certainly learn how to manipulate your imported data in any way that you want, as well as importing it using a macro. You will learn to automate entire processes with the click of a single button and that will save you a lot of time.

      • Richard Mousel says:

        This sounds like what I’d would like to learn. The ability to run one or more reports and then with the single click of an Import button bring the desired data into a worksheet or dashboard, a process I have been told is not that simple requiring an understanding of VBA.

        • don says:

          I think that you will be very pleased with the Projects that are in the course! The second Project in particular is focused specifically on this topic and on making it easy to visualize imported data and then export the desired sub-sets of that data into reports, with formats including PDF, CSV, Excel Workbooks and more, and emailing those reports and more. I am spending a lot of time on the projects to make them as useful as possible so that the course will have a practical focus and not just one of programming theory.

  4. Nikos Andreakos says:

    Not all tutorials are the same but, more or less, one can browse through the net and find interesting stuff. So, from my point of view, what really makes the difference is how easy you make the way “to the point” and the Case Studies. And this is what I’m mainly looking for.

    Thanks for asking for my opinion, it may also useful to know that so far I have watched only a bunch of your videos on your Youtube channel.

    • don says:

      Nikos, you are very welcome! And thanks for your input and watching my videos! I agree with you that the important aspect of the course will be relating these sometimes complex and esoteric concepts to the real world and that is why I am spending so much time right now to add-in the practical “Tasks” and Projects into the course. I never want you to finish a section and ask yourself why you just learned that. It is sometimes a balance between providing enough information to learn a topic well but also making it relatable and I will add as many practical examples now and in the future as is required to make the course as useful as possible. If you have any more comments or thoughts, feel free to leave them here!

  5. John_Ru says:

    Hi Don.
    If you don’t have it covered in the basics, I’d suggest a tutorial on use of the VB Explorer, specifically using the debugging tools (step into, run to etc.) plus use of the Immediate and Locals windows to test/ monitor code running.
    I agree that the Task Manager thing sounds good (for work or home) but suggest that business users might find use from tutorial which converts small project information into a form of dashboard (e.g. with traffic light symbols in summary cells, via conditional formatting ort otherwise).
    Likewise (and using the “for Applications” bit of VBA), it might be handy to cover the rudiments of converting spreadsheet data into with Word or PowerPoint form.

    • don says:

      John, thanks for the input! The final project I plan to bring together as a massive Dashboard setup that incorprates everything that was previously done as well as a UserForm interface for inputting and managing data in a better way. Mainly, I wanted to ensure that I made the features in that project as relevant to people as possible. I have decided that the Task Manager will use a cool visual interface built earlier in the course and be folded into the final project with updated features and then, it seems like an Invoice feature might be nice as well – I’m thinking that Invoices and Tasks will have their own panes at the bottom of the main dashboard that will give a preview of the full list that is in its own page.

  6. Peter says:

    Hi Don,
    I would like to gain more knowledge about the possibilities of e-mailing directly from Excel, creating data files using forms.

    But above all, gaining a lot of basic knowledge to be able to create workable macros from A to Z.

    • don says:

      Peter, I think this course will be perfect for you then! It takes you from nothing to the advanced topics and covers forms from the perspective of making them in the worksheet as well as the more advanced userforms. Emailing is also covered as well as data export that can be used with emails. And each main section that covers more abstract programming principals has at least 1 “Task” that brings together the section to show you how to do something useful with the topic at hand.

      • Peter says:

        Thanks for your answer, Don

        • Peter says:

          Hi Don, I plan to purchase the “Build Professional Forms in Excel” course. Question: Do I not buy duplicates compared to the new course?

          • don says:

            Hi Peter, sorry for my late reply. I replied to your email as well, but the summary is that the VBA course I am making will cover all of the bases that the Forms course covers. The difference is that the Forms course is made so anyone can follow it and the VBA course will teach you the “correct” programming way to do everything, which requires more effort and knowledge.

            If you need a Form input setup like I show in the Forms course and you need it now and you don’t want to learn unrelated topics, then buy that course now. If you have the time to wait for the VBA course and then watch that course to completion, then you can make a much bigger and better setup than I show you in the form, but it will take watching most of the full VBA course to do this.

            In the end, I would make a decision based on how much you actually want to learn and how much time you have, because the full VBA course is over 20 hours now and will probably end up over 30 hours very soon.

            Oh, also, the VBA course will Not cover the custom Conditional Formatting and in-cell Data Validation that the Forms course covers.

            I hope that explains the difference.

  7. John_Ru says:

    Hi Don

    Another thought- a few of the recent questions on the forum (not just from Leopard!) have implied that people are using Excel to create invoices, shipping documents and want macros to move data into tracking sheets. A model form (which allows for corporate style) for that could prove useful to others. Perhaps some kind of “draggable fields” would work; e.g. we call one InvoiceDate say so the user drags it around on a User Form (to suit their style) but it transfers to (and reports reliably/consistently in) tracker sheets.

    John

    • don says:

      Shipping documents is a good touch! I know that I won’t be able to cover everything and so my main goal is not just to show how to make a single thing, but how to build the framework that you can tweak and change and use to suit your needs. I am excited to make a huuge dashboard that can do everything but I am worried it might end up too big lol.

  8. John_Ru says:

    Thanks Don. I think giving a good approach (rather than “one size fits all”) will help many. On the dashboard, hopefully you’ll realise early is it becomes unwieldy

    • don says:

      You’re quite right about crazy dashboards haha, but I think I’ve struck a nice balance. I have managed to make it so that it’s not too crazy while still showing how to add modules and new areas to it to suit the user’s needs. My approach is that I will show something like a Task Manager and the required steps to make that and integrate it into a larger workbook and do so in a way that the user could make their own feature and follow the same steps to integrate it into their dashboard.

  9. Altamish says:

    Don,
    Thank you for everything. Do you have a VBA programming sample on mail merge? I would really like to go through it.

    Thank you once more

    • don says:

      Not specifically. And this course is going to approach it from the standpoint of sending emails in an automated fashion through Outlook via Excel. So, you click a button and that automatically exports a file and emails it to someone.

  10. Martin says:

    Any Idea when you will be able to launch the VBA Course ?

    • don says:

      Final release date is now set at January 11, 2022 – sorry for the late notice. The course will be discounted by 33% for the first two weeks after it goes on sale as a Thanks for everyone’s patience!

      If you have any further questions about the course, you can ask on the post I just made for it here.

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