can a career be made solely out of excel & vba

[ER_Neha]

Hello friends. I am too confused regarding my career options, recently I have gained much interest in excel vba, and I am not finding the right answer to my thoughts, i.e. can a career be made in this ? I mean can someone have a career solely depended on excel ? if yes can someone please enlighten me with some of them, it will be of great help.

 

[Joe4]

I know we talked briefly via messaging already, but I will add this much to the conversation.

You definitely could as an Excel consultant (if you Google "Excel consulting", you will find many links on this). There may not be a bunch of firms that specialize in this that hire many people, so for many people, that means going in to business for yourself, which may mean a bit more work marketing yourself and trying to get a client base.

As I mentioned, I have not made a career solely out of Excel and VBA, but they are tools that I use in my job, along with other computing languages. At one point, my job was "process improvement", and I used Excel and VBA a lot, along with Microsoft Access.

I am sure others will have other good experiences and ideas to share.

 

[dougmarkham]

Hello friends. I am too confused regarding my career options, recently I have gained much interest in excel vba, and I am not finding the right answer to my thoughts, i.e. can a career be made in this ? I mean can someone have a career solely depended on excel ? if yes can someone please enlighten me with some of them, it will be of great help.

Hi ER_Neha,

There are many businesses ---particularly medium sized companies that grew from humble beginnings---that heavily rely upon Excel, in part due to the lack of money they have to invest in bespoke out-of-the-box integrated systems. This means that over the growth of these companies, they have spent as little as possible on software that does what they needed. Often, these programs are used for decades and are well out of date in terms of modern software architecture. Further to that, with operation systems (account management) being separate from webshops, finance systems and logistics systems etc., many business are forced to export to excel and process different sources of data types to match records etc.

This inevitably leads to the need to process lots of data. Companies tend to use reporting systems like SSRS to pull data out of various old programs on their servers, but inproper data handling and systems planning often leaves companies using Excel to clean up the mess.

Finance companies also utilize excel heavily. Mistakes in Excel work can be quite costly, so in that case, sure, maybe they will pay for a talented excel power-user.

Bear in mind though, there are some issues worth considering.
1) Software integration is becoming more widespread and cheaper to achieve
2) Excel itself is due to drop support for VBA in 2030 in favour of the MS script language that can be used in PC's and Mac's.
3) There is more work for programmers working in PhP /SQL than for VBA.
4) Excel is so much a jack of all trades that what ever business you grow within may limit your experience, and therefore your employability. For instance, I work for a POS logistics company and I'm pretty confident that if I wanted a job in finance, I'd need to find a transition job that would allow me to learn lots of new formulas, and their VBA equivalents.

The only upsides to learning VBA is that there is a huge community of users---so lots of people to ask advice and help from---and lots of businesses use Excel even though it's not the best solution for most business in the long-run, so there is probably lots of work you can get.

Schools need Excel proficient administrators, as do businesses with lots of business units, and government businesses such as health departments etc.

There is an argument for learning a combination of SQL and VBA but in particular to learn both Excel and Access VBA. Access (for very small businesses) is a good way of handling data; whereas, without a more experienced VBA programmer, Excel models can be a bit buggy and not as efficient as Access is. Also, when MS change excel, your old models tend to break.

Kind regards,

Doug.

 

[Joe4]

2) Excel itself is due to drop support for VBA in 2030 in favour of the MS script language that can be used in PC's and Mac's.

As far as I know, this is mere speculation, and there has been no definitive statement on this by Microsoft either way at this time.
Do you have something official from Microsoft that says otherwise (if so, I am sure many people here, including myself, would be interested to read the details about it)?

 

[Macropod]

2) Excel itself is due to drop support for VBA in 2030 in favour of the MS script language that can be used in PC's and Mac's.

Where did you get that from? Given that Microsoft still supports WordBasic from the early 90s, I seriously doubt they'll simply "drop support for VBA" any time in the next 20 years. In any event, VBA is already supported on Macs and PCs alike.

And please stop abusing the humble apostrophe...