Programming Excel

Question

I\'d like to give my boyfriend a taste of programming. If it was up to me, I\'d teach Scheme, Haskell or F# but since he\'d rather learn something that can be useful in his

Answer 1

VBA is a great starting point for someone new to development and wants to get a handle on the basics. It is possible to program Excel through many different languages by leveraging the Excel or Word COM libraries. This can be done easily in languages such as C# but is not suitable for someone starting off with programming.

Just word of caution. Although VBA is a fully featured programming language and is capable of supporting complex applications it can encourage poor programming practises. I have seen this occur in large organisations that use Excel extensively for actuarial calculations. Essentially the code was written by actuaries with finacial calculations in mind - not software engineering.

In the long run enterprise programming languages such as Java or C# are better.