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Back to Excel/VBA for Creative Problem Solving, Part 1

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Excel/VBA for Creative Problem Solving, Part 1 by University of Colorado Boulder

4.8
stars
4,129 ratings

About the Course

"Excel/VBA for Creative Problem Solving, Part 1" is aimed at learners who are seeking to augment, expand, optimize, and increase the efficiency of their Excel spreadsheet skills by tapping into the powerful programming, automation, and customization capabilities available with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). This course is the first part of a three-part series and Specialization that focuses on the application of computing techniques in Excel/VBA to solve problems. In this course (Part 1), you will: 1) create macros to automate procedures in Excel; 2) define your own user-defined functions; 3) create basic subroutines to interface with the user; 4) learn the basic programming structures in VBA; and 5) automate Excel’s Goal Seek and Solver tools and use numerical techniques to create “live solutions” to solve targeting and optimization problems. New to computer programming? The extremely intuitive and visual nature of VBA lends itself nicely to teaching and learning - what a fun way to learn to code! No prior knowledge in programming nor advanced math skills are necessary yet seasoned programmers will pick up new and creative spreadsheet problem solving strategies. After you have learned the basics of VBA, each module will introduce foundational and broad problems inspired by situations that you might encounter in the real world. To pass each module, you'll need to pass a mastery quiz and complete a problem solving assignment. This course is unique in that the weekly assignments are completed in-application (i.e., on your own computer in Excel), providing you with valuable hands-on training....

Top reviews

MS

Jan 26, 2018

Great course! I like it goes straight to implementation and is practice-oriented. What could be improved maybe is sound quality of lectures. And maybe it would be great to have some VBA notes in pdf.

JH

Apr 2, 2020

Very good course with clear examples throughout to help you develop. The online format of the course is great as it allows you to pause and work through the activities presented at your own speed.

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1026 - 1050 of 1,182 Reviews for Excel/VBA for Creative Problem Solving, Part 1

By Jean P C G

Jul 26, 2020

Good

By Oscar B

Jul 9, 2020

Top!

By Луиза О

Oct 15, 2018

Grea

By Budi N

Jun 21, 2018

nice

By Linda A L

Sep 21, 2019

:D

By Jeremy K

Apr 2, 2023

This is a great starter course for learning VBA. The instructor is clear, with examples that are easy to follow. I have two small gripes with this course: The quizzes are an appropriate difficulty but I found that the assignments were far too easy, and not thorough enough to provide enough actual practice for students to cement their understanding of the topics. I keep finding myself reviewing my old assignments/screencasts to see what I did because they were so quick and easy that I didn't really get much practice doing them. I plan to do extra practice questions from other websites after I finish Parts 2 + 3. Hopefully Part 3 will provide the practice that I feel I'm missing here. Another thing is really small, but I wish the instructor wouldn't zoom in and out constantly on the screencasts. A single, static screen recording is sufficient. When the screen is moving around it's hard to read the code without pausing constantly, and trying to time the pause before it moves again.

It would be great if the instructor provided a document/index/cheatsheet that quickly described the functions used and the respective syntax. Overall, I would recommend this course! Just make sure you practice outside of it too :)

By Markus M

Aug 31, 2018

The course is well structured and the concepts are explained pretty good - one can follow the screencasts nicely. I subtracted one star, since the assignments/quizzes are too complicated (not too dificult!) in my eyes. I really like challenges, but I want to learn the concept of VBA primarily - therefore the (although announced) focus on math heavy and scientific problems is a little distracting. I spent more times figuring out the math than figuring out the coding while doing the assignment. That is a little unfortunate. The isntructor is super friendly and helpful though. The quizzes are well done, only the assignements could be altered towards a VBA focus rather than having complicated problems with a little VBA. I will continue with part 2 of the course, as I am interested in more applied stuff with VBA.

By Michael G

May 15, 2019

This was an EXCELLENT course. Although I have previous programming experience (I was already familiar with loops and conditional structures), I found the course very informative. I also think it is an excellent introduction for students with little or no programming experience. The instruction, examples, and explanations were clear and informative. I will be recommending the course to others who could benefit from it. Thank you Professor Nuttelman for a great course.

NOTE: I reserve five stars for courses that are so good they defy description. It would be rare for me to give a course five stars. A four-star rating from me indicates an excellent course in all material respects. (And only refers to the content - not the Coursera environment.)

By Richard C

Feb 18, 2019

Nice intro to the basics of VBA. The biggest problem with this introduction is that I don't know what I don't know. The course could have benefited from a discussion of how VBA is used in the workplace by enterprises, and what skills students should learn to quickly become competent. The reason that content was not presented is that Dr. Nuttelman simply does not know the answer to that question, as his background is in academia and engineering. He is working on amassing a set of case studies from students who have graduated, but it doesn't sound like a priority as the course is almost two years old and the content has not been updated with these examples.

By Ondrej P

Nov 21, 2018

Great course to start with VBA. The course focuses on 'how we can solve problem P using VBA', which is suits me much more than typical courses which start with language syntax, data types and so on, on meaningless examples. In this course you can learn all of those basics while actually solving particular problems - and this course demonstrates several ways how to solve different kinds of problems. For people with non-mathematical background some of the topics may seem scary - many problems come from engineering, however they should not be scared. The formulas are provided (no need to do any math there) and student only consumes their result.

By Brittany M

Mar 25, 2020

The course content is solid. The material will come in handy, however, I found the examples to be less than intuitive as I work in auditing and don't have a strong science background. More understandable examples and assignments would be helpful. In addition, I felt that week 4 was a significant amount of material that could possibly be broken into 2 sections. I also thought week 4 would be easier to understand if there was a chart describing the differences between the different types of loops and possibly adding small assignments after each loop to solidify the concepts. Overall it was a good course that I would recommend,

By Achmad P W

Sep 9, 2018

Great fundamental building of VBA Macro programming knowledge and techniques for a person who has no programming or mathematical university background at all. While easy to understand, the course also challenges us to think beyond what is taught, unlocking your mind to logical potential never before experienced. The only minus part is that for a few parts in the course, sometimes the instructor have misread or mistype few information, although it was covered right away with correction marks. Nonetheless, it does not weigh down any bit to this course quality. Highly Recommended!

By Michael R

Oct 31, 2018

I thought the course was excellent. Good level of challenge, well structured and paced. I think the hard test thresholds to progress to the next stage each week are really valuable and encourage revision. There are probably a few developments required to help the user overcome the silly mistakes and oversights that block successful execution of a coding problem or question. Get that worked out and I really think it's going to be really hard to sell this kind of tuition through a bricks and mortar campus.

By Julius W

Mar 28, 2020

Excellent course, although I had prior coding experience. While I successfully completed the five weeks, if I had got stuck somewhere, without posting my answer in the discussion forum, I am not sure who I would have went to for help if I had gotten stuck. Part of the learning process is feedback and the assignments are just yes or no without much direction. I understand the assignments are a bit too open for pre-programmed feedback, but having somewhere to view more hints if I got stuck would be nice.

By Hannah W

Mar 30, 2023

This was a good course and I learned a lot. I was trying to find something that would fill in the gaps in my self taught VBA and this was perfect.

Only reason for dropping a star is that the course encourages sub-optimal practices. There is a lot of select, copy and paste in the exercises. It would be better to teach more efficient ways of doing these things, e.g range1.value = range2.value instead of copy and paste. Some of the better alternatives are not at all complicated.

By Sophia S

May 7, 2022

This course was primarily laid out in a way that is easy to understand. it is very math/science heavy so for people not currently in school, some of the concepts don't apply. Remember to save your assignment files to your C drive, because if you store them elsewhere, it causes problems for the grader files. Also I wish the grader files would provide some details when the grading fails which can help the student other than just saying that the testing didn't pass.

By Brandon H

Jan 29, 2020

The course was good. My focus was learning VBA and getting to a point of being able to design multi-faceted solutions. This got me on my way. The only item I noted as a downside is the focus on mathematical examples requiring order of operations to be understood. While I enjoyed this I don't see it as essential for knowing how to design solutions in VBA and it created some blocks for others in our group who do not enjoy mathematics.

By Vincent A S D

Oct 26, 2020

Very instructional, accurate, and well oriented. I would suggest that the assignments and problems could also be considered under a financial basis field. I noticed that cases and examples were more addressed from an engineering side and not from an accounting or financial perspective. I had no idea of many formulas that were displayed in this course, nonetheless, I was able to go beyond the bar in order to research and learn them.

By victor c

Sep 5, 2018

Very good introductory course in VBA. I have used much of what i have learned in this course to automate certain procedures that me and my team members are using in our gas turbine industry, customer support engineering day to day activities. VBA enabled me to automate these procedures and minimise human induced errors, and generate effortlessly and rapidly a number of solutions to certain straightforward engineering tasks.

By TANVEER A B

Nov 24, 2018

Its a good basic for programming and i really enjoyed. Prior excel experience is required. For working professional like me its difficult to complete the course in 1 month, so your subscription goes into 2nd month and course fee is again deducted and you are left with no option but to continue if you want to pass it. So i recommend organizers to consider 2 months default period for single time fees deduction.

By Vincent G

Jun 7, 2018

Great course for a start in VBA. The screencasts were to the piont and explicit. The assignments were sometimes a little more difficult to follow because the topics were mostly concerned with physics and not business. Also good to know: the formatting of numbers is American. For European students this is valuable information because I failed my first assignment many times because of my E

By Leonel G P

May 28, 2020

Great course, helps a lot to see how VBA can be an additional tool that can help us to address real life problems saving time and resources. Unfortunately the course in my opinion is not fully appropriate for those ones without previous VBA knowledge and certain complex mathematical level understanding if they don't have time to looking for information and practice a lot by their own.

By Zoltán T

May 2, 2020

Pros: The instructor uses real engineering examples, shows useful algorithms, and he is a great lecturer.

Cons: The examples do not use SI units and it is quite annoying to use miles, gallons, inches and cubic feet in the 21st century. More starter files would be useful to follow the examples, it is not efficient to type in long expressions just to be able to start the coding part.

By Chad J

Aug 18, 2022

The class is very informative, easy to follow, and teaches the fundamentals of VBA in a well-structured way. The homework is a refreshing hands-on approach to lock-in the key topics learned. The weekly quizzes are a known pain point, so be prepared for frustration. Overall, I'm satisfied with my decision to enroll and look forward to the next part (except for the quizzes).

By Hisham A

Jul 1, 2020

I believe the course over all lacked rigour in concepts explanations. I believe introduction to concepts of programming would have been helpful for those with no prior experience in programming. But, for me, having a very good experience with programming and scripting as being a Linux user for 3 years, this course just gave what I needed. Thanks professor Nuttelman!