Work Smarter: Build Excel Macros with Claude (Without Coding)

If you spend part of every week doing the same thing in Excel (reformatting the same report, flagging the same exceptions, copying the same data into the same summary), this class is built around that task. You'll use Claude to write VBA macros: short programs that run inside Excel and handle the repetitive work. No coding background is needed; what matters is knowing what you want to stop doing by hand. The honest framing is that Claude writes the code, you paste it in, run it, and see what happens, and when it doesn't work, you describe the problem and have Claude fix it. That write-test-refine loop is the core skill you'll have the opportunity to practice throughout both sessions.

Learners will have the opportunity to:

1. Describe a repetitive task in plain English and watch Claude turn it into VBA code
2. Open the Excel VBA editor, paste the code, and run their first macro
3. Practice reading what the code does well enough to tell Claude when something isn't right
4. Debug a macro that doesn't work: describe the error, let Claude diagnose it, and run the fix
5. Refine a working macro to handle edge cases the first version missed
6. Experiment with building at least one macro around a real task from their own work
7. Explore what VBA can and can't do, and when it's the wrong tool for the job
8. Work through why macros need to be enabled, and how to save and share a macro-enabled workbook

Topics

- Turning plain-English task descriptions into VBA code
- The Excel VBA editor: pasting and running macros
- The write-test-refine debugging loop
- Handling edge cases
- Example scenarios: formatting weekly reports to a template, flagging rows over a threshold, generating summary sheets, validation checks before a report goes out
- What VBA can and can't do
- Enabling, saving, and sharing macro-enabled workbooks