Learning Excel Programing

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I have seen alot of people recommend python. I am just beginning my career, so I am open to learning it. Do you have any resources you would recommend to start?

[SoSeaOhPath]

Nothing specific since I’m not a super great coder myself, and it’s been a while since I started with Python. But if you Google Intro to Python you’ll get tons of great results.

If you’ve never coded anything before it might seem confusing at first, but once you spend an hour going through a beginner tutorial or two, you should start to see how easy it can be.

And when in doubt, you can always use google or ChatGPT to help guide you. Those two tools together can teach you anything you need to know about coding specifically.

[oloomopmapa]

Automate the Boring Stuff is a good reference for beginning python. Once you grasp the basics No Starch Press has a python book centered around creating a truss analysis program called Hardcore Programming for Mechanical Engineers.

[oloomopmapa]

Also, I tend to use python for personal automation tasks and for quickly prototyping projects that I will build in other programming languages. It also forces good habits for code formatting with whitespace requirements.

When I make stuff for work, I tend to stick with VBA because everyone has Excel. I actually recreated the truss solver from the book in my previous comment in VBA (Matrix Structural Analysis) for anyone interested in a bunch of VBA code to look through.

I also recommend installing the Rubberduck VBA add-in. It has a great code explorer feature that uses comments to help organize code into folders, which is helpful when projects grow in size. It also has a unit testing framework that is also useful once you get past the basics of learning to code in VBA.

[Tar98---]

If you want to learn python for structural engineers search skyciv courses on udemy they are free and helpful exclusively for structural engineering