Learning the basics of Excel VBA can greatly enhance your productivity and allows you to automate the many rather mundane tasks during the engineering process. Here are some examples ...

• Convert a simple Excel grid into PowerPoint slide shapes with connecting arrows (basic data flow diagram)
• Apply rules to reformat data to remove inconsistencies, such as object renaming ('Holland' to 'Netherlands' for example)
• Compare a publisher application report extract with a consumer database SQL extract using the automation of Pivot Table generation and delta cell assignment
• Hide detailed information relating to a cell, column or row until a Mouseover event occurs (or other such pre-definable event)
• Generate a summary 'Time-Spend by Category' timesheet grid based on cell background colours
• Merge contents of a set of files that have the same internal data format structures