Course description

If you spend hours every week doing the same spreadsheet jobs by hand, such as formatting an export, building the same report or copying four files into one, this course shows you how to hand those jobs to Excel. You'll record macros, read and write VBA, and build macros that check their own results, so you can trust them with real work.

There are 10 sections and 51 written lessons, and each one ends with a short exercise using the section's practice files. You follow Ivana, a sales and reporting administrator at a packaging wholesaler in Rugby, as she automates her Monday morning sales report and the month-end consolidation of four branch returns. In the final project you automate the April month-end yourself, from a folder of branch files to a checked summary and PDF. Every section has a practice pack with workbooks, code modules to import, model answers and a cheat sheet.

What you'll learn

• Getting started with macros: which jobs are worth automating and which aren't, the Developer tab, macro security and trusted locations, and saving macro-enabled workbooks.
• Recording macros: recording your first macro, absolute and relative references, the Personal Macro Workbook, reading recorded code and what the recorder can't do.
• The VBA editor: the Project Explorer, modules, typing your first macros, running code line by line and the Immediate window.
• VBA basics: variables and data types, the Excel object model, Range and Cells, values and formats, and With blocks.
• Decisions and loops: If and Select Case, For Next and For Each loops, Do loops and how to stop one that never ends.
• Working with ranges and data: finding the last row, checking every row, copying without selecting, sorting, filtering, deleting rows and working faster with arrays.
• Formatting and building reports: formatting from code, a summary table, highlighting, page setup and PDFs, and one macro that builds the whole weekly report.
• Working across sheets and workbooks: adding and deleting sheets, opening and closing workbooks, looping through every file in a folder, a consolidation and the checks that prove it.
• Users, forms, events and buttons: message boxes and input boxes, building a UserForm and its code, workbook and worksheet events, and buttons that run macros.
• Reliable macros and the final project: debugging, error handling, your own worksheet functions, documenting and sharing macros, and a full month-end to automate yourself.

Who it's for

Office, finance, sales and admin staff who use Excel every week and keep repeating the same steps. You should be comfortable with everyday Excel. You don't need any coding experience: every line of VBA is explained as you meet it.

What this course is, and isn't

This is a course about macros and VBA in the Excel desktop app for Windows: Excel in Microsoft 365 or Excel 2024 (Excel 2021 works too, but Microsoft stopped supporting it on 13 October 2026). It doesn't teach formulas or pivot tables, and it mentions Office Scripts, Power Automate and Python only briefly, as alternatives. You can't create or run VBA macros in Excel for the web, and Excel for Mac works differently in places. If you use Excel at work, follow your organisation's rules on macros.

What will I learn?

• Decide which spreadsheet jobs are worth automating, and set up Excel to record, store and run macros safely
• Record macros, store them in a workbook or the Personal Macro Workbook, and tidy the recorded code
• Find your way round the VBA editor, and run code line by line to see what it does
• Write VBA with variables, data types, objects, Range and Cells, If and Select Case, and loops
• Find the last row of any data, check every row, and copy, sort, filter and delete without selecting
• Build a formatted weekly report with a summary table, highlighting and a PDF, from one macro
• Combine every file in a folder into one sheet, and check the result against each file's own figures
• Ask users for input with message boxes and a UserForm, react to events, and run macros from buttons
• Debug, handle errors, write your own worksheet functions and document macros so someone else can run them
• Automate a full month-end from a folder of branch returns to a checked summary and PDF

Frequently asked questions