VBA or SQL

Black Swan Wrote:
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> How old’s the mac? I think I heard VBA’s back in
> ms suite 2011 for macs? Could be wrong tho, also
> don’t know about functionality
I think that’s correct (though you should double check), and even more importantly: the UI has converged, so that Excel 2011 works identically on Macs and PCs. If you can scare up an educational discount you should be able to pick up just Excel (assuming you don’t need the whole Office Suite) for just a Benjamin or so – a lot less than a new PC (to which you’d need to add Excel anyway).
 
Mobius Striptease Wrote:
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> old school gangstaz use fortran
hellz ya!
 
VBA for Dummies is pretty good but 75% of the book is really irrelevant to what we do. It does teach you the proper syntax and methods for constructing programs though. Seriously the best way to learn is to just start with a basic “Hello World” program and build out from there. When you run into problems figuring out how to do something, do a quick google search or post a question on an online VBA help forum. Feel free to post a question on here as well as many of us have a fair basis in VBA and other types of programming. You will find that VBA is flexible enough and the Microsoft object library is broad enough to pretty much do anything you can think of.
One more piece of advice. I know that some people suggest that you should just record a macro and then tweak it. If you really want to get into some serious automation you are much better off learning how to program from scratch. You will find that you can do things much faster by working within the runtime environment and then just outputting the results to the excel spreadsheet. As you get better, eventually you will want to abandon VBA completely and work with VB or C# so that you can run your programs as standalone applications and then from within your program just launch excel long enough to output the results to a worksheet.
 
wazzle Wrote:
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> I’m interested in learning VBA or SQL. I don’t
> really know much about these but was looking into
> taking some training classes in the Boston area.
> Does anyone know some good providers? Are these
> training programs worth it or should I try to
> train myself?
>
> Thanks
SQL is very useful because you often have to do drill-downs into databases, and these are often based on SQL searches, although you might enter the query through some sort of tool.
VBA is more of a programming tool or, to be more precise, it is a programming tool, a programmer’s tool.
I suggest you start by taking a look at SQL because it’s the easiest to learn of the two and understanding SQL will probably be more useful on a general level. Then, if you find it’s not enough given your needs, you can learn VBA or some other programming tool.
 
Anybody knows wherer and how much VBA are used in Finance?
Especially with CFA contained subjects?
 
From what ive seen, vba is fairly common in pm, and from there more technical investment strategies.
 
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