The Myth About Excel Macro

The Myth

Today I got a call from a gentleman who would like to improve his Excel skills. This is how part of the conversation went.

"I would like to learn macro."

"What's your job title? "

"I am a project manager. I need to use Excel to ..."

"Have you used Pivot Table?"

"No."

"Have you created charts?"

"No."

"Have you used VLOOKUP function?"

"No."

Have you used SUMIFS function?

"No."

"OK, in that case, you will be able to learn macro in half an hour, but it's not what you think it is. Behind the macro, it's actually the programming language VBA. Just learning macro does not help you much, it's the VBA that will help you to truly automate your Excel tasks."

"So, should I be learning VBA then?"

"No! You do not NEED to learn VBA. I'm just saying that to accomplish the automation you thought would be accomplished by macro, it actually requires the VBA coding skills. What you really need is the function and formulas skills within Excel, not the VBA."

The Truth

I have had many this type of conversations with people who are at basic or beginner level of Excel skills throughout the years.

Many of them do not know the natural progression of Excel skills development. They thought in order to be advanced at Excel skills, they need to learn macro to automate their tasks within Excel.

If you read my article What Truly Are the Different Levels of Excel Skills?, you will understand, before you automate using VBA, there are many more things you need to master.

For most professional and management position people, they never need to learn VBA programming language. If you can automate using easier to learn tools like pivot tables and functions/formulas, why bother to use a much more difficult to learn tool like VBA?

Of course, for a smaller amount of people who are more technical, to accomplish the degree of automation they need, VBA might be the only tool available within Excel.

For this gentleman working as a project manager, it's unlikely for him to have the need to use VBA. It's much more important for him to master pivot tables and functions/formulas, which are the most essential and important Excel skills. If his role and work ever evolves to the point of needing VBA, he can always learn VBA at that time, definitely not now.

Macro is covered within the SE1-B Super Excel Pivot Tables & Charts course. After this course, you will be able to use macro to accomplish some automations, and gain clear understanding what is behind macro. You will feel at ease that you may not have, or never need the VBA programming skills. Or, depending on your career goal, you may realize, when down the road, you will need to learn VBA, which is typically after you have mastered the skills within SE2 Super Excel Data Processing & Analysis course and/or SE3 Super Excel Modeling & Array Formulas course.