Teaching is my passion, but helping fellow strugglers is my calling

My mission is to empower people who are intimidated by VBA, with ideas and generic code, they can tweak easily and use in their projects.

How I decided to start writing this blog:

I work on Excel a lot, and I realized that writing a few lines of code could save me the trouble of doing mundane procedures repetitively. I intend to post the Functions, Procedures, Tools and Add-ins that I write, in this blog, so fellow strugglers like me can benefit from my experience. I also hope to get help from experts and improve my codes through this blog. I expect it to take a while before you find this blog useful. At the least, this will be a fun way to store my codes.

Where I learnt the art:

I worked as an Actuarial Analyst in one of the best Pension Consulting Firms in the World, and I got a chance to work with their Excel Model Building and Maintenance teams. I worked with a couple of brilliant minds there. They had standards, they had philosophies, they had flair, they had it all! I helped them set small models from scratch; then went on to collaborate with them on some of their bigger models. I owe it all to the fellows there!

A bit about myself:

I specialized in actuarial science in my masters’ program, and I want to become a qualified actuary. I invest extra time and effort into creating intuitive spreadsheet applications that improve productivity at the workplace.

Almost all of the people who have dramatically influenced my life were enthusiastic academicians. I believe that the greatest gift in life is having a nurturing mentor, and I would like to be that for someone. I intend to embark on this journey as an actuary, coaching associates to become proactive consultants. Eventually, I would like to become a professor at a university, moulding students into resilient professionals. I owe it to my future mentee, to become the best at what I do; and I consciously direct my endeavors at gathering what I consider essential traits of a seasoned mentor.

Graphics Designer

And by the way, I created my blog’s logo. I was a Photoshop and Illustrator enthusiast back in the day.

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Donate:

All the content in my blog is free to use. You can use the tools and code that I have published here even for commercial purposes. If you feel like compensating me for my effort, and support me in keeping this blog alive, I urge you to donate.

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9 Comments

  1. Robert Torres
    Reply
    April 9, 2014,

    Hey Ejaz,

    You’re snake game is really awesome and very useful in a corporate environment. You mentioned you would like to mentor someone to help them excel in their career or their passion for Microsoft Excel. If you we’re to mentor, what would be your approach for someone like me who lives in the U.S.? I am an analyst with a limited knowledge on VBA. I would like to expand that skill and become an intermediate VBA user.

    Any advice would be much appreciated.

    Thanks,

    • Struggling to Excel
      Reply
      April 9, 2014,

      Hi Robert,

      I am glad you liked the game. Finally, someone who actually read my About page 😀

      I did mention that I’d like to be a mentor, however, I don’t see myself as ready to be one yet.

      My advice is:

      First go through a very basic VBA for Excel book. To get a feel for the language
      Envision a lot of projects and write your own code. Automating stuff at work is a good start. Since you are in the Analytics business, I am sure your firm still sticks to outdated templates that make life miserable. Reinvent them and develop working prototypes and then pitch it to your manager.
      The next step, get feedback on the code you have written. That was the main reason I created this blog. You might also consider looking through code written by experienced people and try to understand every line. You will learn how to structure code, how to deal with errors and how to make your code run faster.
      4.Never learn VBA by recording macros. They are a great way to learn which Objects/properties to modify, but they are not optimal. I have seen a lot of people still Selecting the cell first, and then use Selection.Whatever = whichever. That is not a great way to write code.
      Coding Tips: Try to develop reusable Subs that accept arguments. And then write a cover macro that calls the reusable subs depending on your current requirements. Declare all your variables, objects and use the Option Explicit. Disable Screen updating and Events before running a macro. Use Named Ranges instead of cell references or just Range.Offset. Indent code. Write loadsa comments, for yourself and others.

      I got a similar question today on another post of mine, the Progress bar. I’d suggest you read the answer I gave there also.

      I talk about best practices that I have learnt in some of my posts, check out my Progress bar post, Codename to the rescue post, Local Trumps Global post and the volatile functions post for a start.

    • Struggling to Excel
      Reply
      April 27, 2014,

      Thanks Vasanth. Much appreciated. I hope you would invite a few of your friends to visit my blog. Cheers.

  3. Sithi Sahleena
    Reply
    July 2, 2014,

    Hi Ejaz,

    Your Passion, Mission, Mentoring.teaching – Impressive 🙂
    Best Wishes

  4. Lukas Rohr
    Reply
    April 12, 2016,

    Happened upon your blog today. I work as a MS Office Programmer myself and am of course an Excel enthusiast myself. Just wanted to say, stick with it, having a blog has multiple rewards… the contacts you make being one of the best. Very good stuff so far… keep up the good work! :- )

    Cheers, Lukas

    • Ejaz
      Reply
      April 12, 2016,

      Thank you! Means a lot to me. I will try my best to keep it up.

  5. JoshC
    Reply
    August 13, 2020,

    Time for an update Ejaz! 😉

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