Excellent question!
VBA stands for Visual Basic for Applications and is the macro / automation tools that comes with Office (the macro that you talk about in your post will be written in VBA).
VBA sounds like a perfect match:
- VBA is targeted at non-techies and so is designed to be forgiving and easy to pick up.
- Google contains a wealth of information on the subject, all targeted people in your situation (people without a technical background who simply want to produce an Office macro that helps them)
- Using Office every day will give you an opportunity to use and practice what you learn.
- VBA has a fantastic macro recording function which is incredibly useful (especially when you are trying to learn VBA)
Like I said, Google has a wealth of information and introductory articles on the subject (e.g. Getting Started Using VBA, to pick a good looking example). I recommend reading through one of those to get a quick overview and then just have a go and see what you can get it to do:
- Use the macro recorder! If you can't work out how to do something then just record a macro of you doing it and see if you can figure out how to do it from the code it generates.
- Give yourself problems to solve.
- Ask questions here! :-)
Also, many places will offer courses on VBA which I'd definitely recommend - guides on Google will be excellent for showing you the syntax and how to do do certain actions (like how to select a certain cell, or how to do loops), however they won't be as good at teaching the problem solving aspects of programming - for this you really need to learn from a person which is where a course will be very helpful.
As a final note, I would advise against trying to understand macros that other people have written (for example the macro you mention in your question) - understanding code is far more difficult that writing it, besides if those programmers coding skills are anything like their social skills its probably not code you want to be learning from anyway...
Good luck!
