Has anyone here ever paid for Excel training?

Has anyone here ever paid for Excel training? Please let me know why you paid for it? Excelforum is awesome and free.
Anyways, if you had a choice before buying, would you prefer standard learning (videos+texts+quizzes), or smart learning (simulations, bite-sized clips, analytics)? Smart learning can be more motivational and much faster to learn, but it requires more engagement from the student.

So, why did you pay for that excel training, and what's your preference? Standard learning or smart learning?

We are planning to build something in this space and we want to know your thoughts on this first. Thank you!

Luckily, the company I work for paid a few books and a CD. The first book was Excel VBA Programming for Dummies (great resource) and Excel 2010 Expert Skills. I had an older book, Writing Excel Macros, lying around that is for Excel 97 and 2000 which has been somewhat useful. The company I work for bought an Excel VBA Programming cd for me that was pretty much useless and a waste of the companies money.
All I can say is that I learned more from, and my favorite recourses are the ".....For Dummies" book and the EXCELLENT members of this forum!!!!

As far as learning preferences....I think it might depend on the person(s).
I prefer to actually DO the work, not just be told or shown how to do it. You can tell/show me how to do something until you and I are both "blue in the face" and I might retain 20% of what you tell me. If I actually do the work, I will retain about 90% and get the other 10% through trial and error. Which, by the way, trial end error is the best learning tool, IMO.

So, maybe a combination of both learning tools:
Maybe quizzes from the Standard Learning and all options from the Smart Learning.

@gmr4evr,

I don't think there is an End Ifs in VBA.

If you put the If Then on the same line, you don't need the End If a few lines below.

See the first hit in Google.

I agree with Tom, I am a hands-on kinda guy, books dont too much for me. I have VBA for dummies, and i have yet to get as high as a dummy with it

@ Tim, I would suggest that you use complete words here please, This is not a cell phone chat, and many here would probably not know how to speak "chat"
Thanks

Originally Posted by FDibbins

@ Tim, I would suggest that you use complete words here please, This is not a cell phone chat, and many here would probably not know how to speak "chat"
Thanks

i find this suggestion quite strange:
http://www.excelforum.com/search.php?searchid=5517263

I get this message when I click on your link:

vBulletin Message


Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms.

I can't see *.png images (on this site).

Thanks Ford.
Pfffft, yea, I'm no where near the level of dummy either. There is so much to learn, retain and try hard not to forget, especially the easier stuff like syntax and spelling...or even using a l instead of a 1 (the 2 look very similar in VBA). I learn A LOT of new things on here ever day. For instance, I just saw a post where the OP had multiple If's in their code and ended them with End Ifs <--------Really??? You can do this???? I'm sure going to try it and find out!

I have started *trying* to learn VBA on YouTube, and I think that having at least a simulated exercise to work through/build on, you be a great idea - although maybe not for everyone

May I make a suggestion? When first starting, let the people SEE the results of what the code is doing/going to do, meaning, let them run it themselves by stepping through it, don't just give them a piece of some code, working or not and say "here ya go".
The biggest problem with the CD that the company bought for me was that it gave all kinds of code for all different things (I presume) but no explanation of what the code would do or what it was for. Heck, it didn't even explain where to put the code, IE module, sheet, ThisWorkbook etc., and about 90% of the cd was a video. I was totally lost with the CD and went right back to the books and this site. I am assuming the CD was meant for an advanced user, even though it was titled for beginners.

Never been to training and never read a book. Some guy showed me how you could add up a column of numbers on lotus 1-2-3 25 years ago and I thought that was pretty cool. Taught myself the rest. Got to agree that I learn heaps reading through some of the posts here

Neither can I.

Tim, what is your point? Instead of trying to post pics, just tell me.

Originally Posted by tim201110

i am not the first to write y, smbd and smth

I have no idea what those mean (and I refuse to do a Google search on it! ).

Hey Tim,

My best learning happens when I get a problem and "OWN" it. That means I want to understand the problem and how to solve it. This forum allow me and others to own a problem and work to a solution. If you want to teach Excel, you should start with problems and get the students to own them. Then show them how to use the tools built into Excel to get to a solution. I'm very oriented to Problem -> Solution learning.

Many times when working on a problem I find I don't have a concept right or the correct box in my mind to put what is being demonstrated. There are so many tools in Excel and terms to learn it takes a while to create all those mind storage places.

Lately I've been heading up to YouTube to see demos. I find watching other people solve problems always gives me new information. We learn by watching others as well as doing them ourselves.

@MarvinP,
You are correct, End Ifs doesn't work I tried using the End Ifs that I saw on another post and I got an error that I had never seen before...
"Compile error:
Expected: If or Select or Sub or Function or Property or Type or With or Enum or end of statement."

As for having the If/Then on the same line, I have tried that, as I've seen others use it, but it seems there are times when it doesn't "work" properly. I have had issues where when I do it that way and there are multiple IF/Then statements, some of them get skipped. If I change them to Multi line If/Then statements, they work. I have even helped others (very few) on here by separating the If/Thens to get it to work. It seems to be hit or miss....or just maybe I/we are doing something wrong

@tim201110,
SMDH - Looking at the post that triggered your last post

@ Tim, I would suggest that you use complete words here please, This is not a cell phone chat, and many here would probably not know how to speak "chat"
Thanks

I don't see anything that says no one else does it. What I see is someone saying that not everyone knows what your abbreviations mean. I am pretty "chat" talk savvy and have no idea what smbd or smth mean. I think y is short for you??? If so, why not just use u like we do here. The "chat" talk is not universal, nor does everyone know "chat" talk so they (myself included) are going to be clueless as to what you are trying to say.

I don't believe the person that posted this meant it as a personal attack on u, they were just suggesting that "chat" talk not be used here.

gmr4evr1, you are correct there. I have grown up using "net speak" and chatted on IRC for years.

Tim, all I am saying is that is is often hard enough to try and understand what you want, without trying to decipher what you are saying. If you want to be taken seriously, and I dont just mean in here...........

Seeing as this is not really an excel question, I am moving it to the water cooler

I just did a Google search smbd and smth, and got a very WIDE variety of results (especially the smbd one ). Guess what, I still don't know what either of them mean

No problem.

have not paid for training for myself but made others in the office do training

i give them two weeks before they all forget most of it

I have had no training, I am self-taught, mainly learning from need and from forums (mainly this 1)

I am self trained. Have never taken an excel class. I have purchased books on VBA/Macros. I have used the internet/forums to seek answers I did not know how to solve. Working/volunteering in forums like this have raised my ability greatly.

Cross-posted at: http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-q...ng-before.html

Learning Excel requires active practice and watching videos without practicing is a waste of time and money.

1 thing to keep in mind though, is that you just simply have to KNOW that certain functions exist, knowledge that comes through practice, seeing how others "have done it", and a curiosity to see if there are other/better/different ways to do things you have always done a certain way

If I was 30 years younger I think I would be interested in something like a community college course in VBA.

Originally Posted by Tony Valko

If I was 30 years younger I think I would be interested in something like a community college course in VBA.

so...when you were 10?

I never paid for Excel training and I never paid for s.e.x either.

Alan Sidman has described my experience exactly. In addition to Writing Excel Macros by Steven Roman I also used Excel 2000 by Julitta Korol - I thought her book was terrific!

Considering
1) The built-in help documentation,
2) The active forums that have like three decades of depth,
and
3) The excellent blogs maintained by consultant developers,

There's a great deal of high-quality information that you can use for learning, just from there.

At first I just wanted to understand more about functions and charting for my job, so I after tooling around in google, I figured it out by forum-posts.

After that I wanted to get a little deeper into structured learning, so what I did was ask myself:
"What does every button in the Ribbon do?"

By the time I was finished with that, compared to what's offered in paid training, I was already past that.

Or rather, if you're pretty good at google queries and can articulate yourself to a search engine, you can find worked examples from real world problems for pretty much everything, and the hard stuff has usually already been discussed and explained in a blog post somewhere. I don't much care for videos (they go too slowly on the simple things, and too quickly over the actual subtle tricks in my opinion, the timing never works so I'd rather read documentation), but there's plenty of those, too.

So in a sense, if you're good with search engines, then learning excel is easy.

Well, I still haven't really learned VBA though, but that's more like learning a specialized language than learning an application, which is a bit different.

Originally Posted by ben_hensel

Well, I still haven't really learned VBA though, but that's more like learning a specialized language than learning an application, which is a bit different.

Yes, for me, its like learning a new language (which, essentially, it is), I know a few words here and there, but the grammar and syntax escapes me

i think the thread over at MrExcel hits it on the head
with johnnyC's response and TMS's example

Without the "want" to learn people simply just "learn" (and i use the term loosely) enough to get by
even with the "learning"..without going use, its likely to be lost

ben you are right
most of my responses these days is often just googling stuff for people....because either their lack of knowledge of the correct terms to use (or just plain laziness which sometimes leads me to think about use lmgtfy

"LMGTFY" WTF is That!?

Orrin

Click on this link

http://lmgtfy.com/

Thanks Alan