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Is knowing Excel VBA a good starting point for learning any other programming languages?
Yes – If you are a “BUSINESS USER” (non-programmer) looking to get into programming (part time/full-fledged).
My whole point stands on one belief –
You learn best when “you connect what you learn with something you know”.
Now, if you understand why Microsoft introduced VBA – It is to help business users like us automate our routine tasks – which were consuming more than 60% of our work.
Considering the fact that we are business users, the programming interface was made comparatively easy to learn and implement, without any need for an IT intervention – allowing us to quickly develop our own automation and applications.
So, how does learning VBA become easy for business users?
Code is written inside the Excel
The tool that we are most familiar with. It gives us that comfort level and before even we know we start writing full-fledged programs.
Being comfortable with the environment is the first step to learn any programming language.
Since we would be new to other programming interface and would take our own time to get familiar with their environment, VBA in Excel will straight help us in understanding all the programming concepts right from a variable, looping, arrays, functions, procedures, objects, properties, methods etc. via Excel environment
You can easily see the outcome of your code and understand things,
why is it happening the way it is happening – this will give you scope to rectify your code then and there – which would be less challenging in other programming languages.
Programming
Programming Concepts you learn here will be more or less the same across all the languages.
VBA will help us get strong with Desktop and object-based programming.
This would certainly lay a good foundation for learning object-oriented programming (like C#, Java), database programming and web based programming (like ASP.NET, MVC, NodeJS etc.). We can say, having hands-on with VBA, learning other programming languages would be more of an “incremental learning”.
Do check few of the real-time VBA Projects done by the Business Users @ https://bit.ly/3jUTCtW
Power BI
SQL
Power Apps
Power Automate
Microsoft Fabrics
Azure Data Engineering
