Excel & VBA Programming

Course Overview

Microsoft Excel has been at the top of the world’s most popular software list for many years. Excel is used by an estimated 750 million people worldwide and Satya Nadella has proclaimed it as Microsoft’s most important consumer product.

In finance, Excel is used across the board to facilitate calculations – from the most basic, involving only a few additions and multiplications, to the most advanced: yield curve construction, portfolio optimisation, and option pricing. It is also used as a front-end to derivative pricing libraries, which are usually written in C++ or C#.

Excel has several advantages over Python and Jupyter. The data is right in front of the user (literally on the spreadsheet) and can be visualised with just a few mouse clicks. Excel’s formula language is straightforward; the user can master it without much programming knowledge. The optional Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) integrates seamlessly with the spreadsheet and enables the users to implement sophisticated financial codes.

Learning Objectives

• To introduce Microsoft Excel.
• To study the Excel formula language – its basic and advanced elements.
• To consider data visualisations offered by Excel.
• To introduce VBA.
• To explore how VBA can be used to write user-defined functions in Excel.