Excel Programming and Automation

About

This course focuses on how to take advantage of Excel’s programming and automation functionalities, with no prior knowledge or experience necessary. It will give you a competitive edge when using Excel in both your further studies and career. The course focuses on advanced usage of Excel, with a particular emphasis on writing user – defined functions and (typescript) code to program and automate workbooks (Microsoft has recently announced the ability to use Python in Excel – this is not currently generally available, but will be incorporated into the course if and when it becomes so). In addition to learning how to leverage these powerful tools to increase your proficiency & productivity with Excel, you will also benefit from an introduction to basic programming concepts – illustrated by their application to data processing in Excel.

Students are required to have access to their own computers with access to Excel on the web (i.e. via an Office 365 subscription). The course is open for students from all disciplines and has no prerequisites

Course leader

Adam Lee, Jonas Moss

Target group

Students currently enrolled in a bachelor/undergraduate programme at university level

Course aim

Learning outcomes - Knowledge

By the end of the course, the student will be able to:

Understand, explain and use advanced spreadsheet concepts, including:
the user interface
user-defined functions
programmatic cell and sheet manipulation
Excel objects
Understand and explain general programming concepts:
syntax
variables
data types and structures
control flow
functions
object oriented programming
functional programming
All with a focus on data processing in Excel.

Learning outcomes - Skills

By the end of the course, the student will be able to:

design, implement, run, test and debug code in Excel based on a given textual description of a problem
process, analyze, summarize and visualize datasets using Excel
read, write and understand user-defined functions and Excel scripts
automate workflows in Excel

General Competence

By the end of the course, the student will have stronger competence in:

processing and analyzing data with help of computers
using online resources as aids to solve problems
reading and understanding technical documentation
working in groups

Fee info

Fee-paying students from one of our partner universities will automatically receive a 10% discount on the tuition fee. (Note: the waiver applies to the tuition fee only, not the total programme fee)