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

There's basically two big options: he can write VBA code (macro's) or .NET code.

VBA code, being built on a simple language, has a low threshold. But if he's interested in programming in general, he might be much better off learning .NET (preferably C#). It's much more powerful than VBA and will teach him a lot more about proper software construction and essential concepts behind it.

I think it would be best to have him program some silly little Winforms applications first to get the basics down, and then look in to Excel interop. You can find a bunch of examples of C# / Excel intererop code by googling for "C# Excel". Here is one example:

http://dotnetperls.com/Content/Excel-Interop-Performance.aspx