Not sure if we deserve all the reviews you can see on this site? Here are some of the things we do (very) differently to earn them.
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Friendly and professional training ... guaranteeed▼
How can any training company guarantee the quality of their courses? Here's how:
We limit our courses to no more than 6 people per class.
Unlike almost every other computer training company, we never subcontract or use freelancers - here's why this matters.
The best courseware in the industry? See for yourself▼
Our course manuals and exercises are by some way the best in the computer training industry. Fortunately you don't have to take our word for this - you can see for yourself:
It's dangerous to be sanctimionius, but we can see no possible benefit that tobacco and gambling companies bring to the world (and quite a lot of harm), so we choose not to work for them. Sorry.
We've put a lot of thought into making our online courses as useful and interactive as possbile:
Delegates use Remote Desktop to connect to our machines, so our trainers can see everyone's screens at all time.
We arrange (without charge) a half-hour pre-course check for each online delegate before courses, to ensure that they everyone will be able to join the course seamlessly when it begins.
As well as providing a PDF of the manual and exercises for each online course delegate we will (again without charge) also post this out to each person a few days before if required.
Choose a specific course, or stay on this page to see all of our Programming training.
Course:
Our current Macros and Programming scheduled courses
Can't see the dates/course type that you want? Create your own onsite course (and tailor the content too!).
Course
Dates
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UK times
We don't have any scheduled courses for this combination of criteria: please try different options.
If you can't see the course you want listed above, don't despair! If you can muster 3 or 4 people together, it may well be worth organising an onsite course at your office (we'll provide and set
up the computers), or else
an online course tailored to your needs.
Our Macros and Programming classroom training venues
What other people have said about our Programming training
Here are some comments we've received about our Programming + training. You can see all of our 473 reviews here. We would like to sincerely thank the clients whose names are shown below for kindly agreeing to let us share their feedback.
"I have been struggling with SQL since being given the task and trying to keep up with my colleagues. This was a very informative course, easy to follow and the trainer was very patient and knowledgeable."
Gaynor Garside-Gee
Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust
"A fantastic tutor who made the subject really interesting and talked in depth about each process. I felt I learnt quite a lot during the course."
Daniel Milne
Durham County Council
"Excellent course, worked well online and felt an excellent interactive experience. Plenty of one on one time and would use again without any doubt. Used WiseOwl before and had the knowledge the course would provide everything needed."
Simon Lyons
The Original Factory Shop
"The course gave a great initial introduction to SQL and how to build useful queries that I can use to interrogate our datasets."
Imogen Soper
Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG)
"Really enjoyed both days and the trainer did an excellent job. "
James Lavelle
Ignite Systems
"An excellent trainer. Very knowledgeable and explained things in a way that was easy to understand."
Alex Brian
Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS FT
About our Programming training
We like programming! To help you choose which language to learn, we've included a quick guide below. To avoid any bias, the languages are listed in alphabetical order.
Language
When and why you would use it
C#
Visual C# allows you to build websites and forms-based systems in .NET.
Office Scripts
The new way to automate Excel (and presumably in the future other Microsoft applications) using a language based upon TypeScript.
Python
An increasingly popular language used to manipulate data, scrape websites, analyse statistics and much more besides.
SQL
SQL allows you to extract information from SQL Server databases, and then manipulate it.
VBA
Visual Basic for Applications is the language included in Microsoft Office, and allows you to automate Excel, Access and other programs.
Here are the main courses that we teach in each language:
If you're not a specialist programmer, you'll probably want to avoid learning Python or C#, but becoming proficient in Office Scripts, SQL or VBA may well make you able to do day-to-day tasks more quickly, without needing to resort to getting help from your (busy) IT department all the time.
Whichever language you choose, you'll have to master the same core concepts:
Concept
Explanation
Variables
Variables are places in which you can store single items of data, such as integers, dates and bits of text.
Conditions
At the heart of programming is the ability to test a condition, to see which execution path to follow.
Loops
Also at the heart of programming is the ability to repeat a series of steps a number of times, perhaps while a particular condition is true.
Programming has come on over the years, but the essential principles remain the same (in virtually every language you create variables, test conditions and iterate over loops). To show the evolution of programming over the decades, here are the languages learnt by the oldest of the Wise Owls:
Decade
Main language learnt
Notes
1980s
Fortran
In early Fortran you had to colour in shapes on punch cards with a 2B pencil! How times have changed ...
1990s
VBA
The 1990s saw Microsoft roll out Visual Basic for Applications across all of the MIcrosoft Office product range; it's still going strong today.
2000s
SQL
T-SQL is the dialect of SQL used for extracting data from SQL Server.
2010s
C#
C, C++, Java and JavaScript are all variants of C#.
2020s
Python
The up-and-coming language, Python allows you to write more concise code and supports lots of additional libraries.
2030s?
?
What will be the language we will be writing in the AI era?
We don't train in Fortran (thank goodness), but we do still train in the languages from the other decades.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions
Click on any heading below to learn more.
How can I contact you with any questions?▼
You can reach us in one of the following ways:
Contact method
Details
Phone
Call us on (0161) 883 3606 and (within normal UK office hours) a friendly and helpful human will answer the phone!
Email
Send an email to our inbox and we'll aim to answer it within a couple of working hours.
Web
Fill in an enquiry form letting us know what you want to achieve, and we'll do our best to help!
Is there an easy way for me to assess my Programming skills?▼
You can take the following tests to assess your Macros and Programming skills on this site:
Each tests consists of 20 questions. The tests are free and anonymous, and at the end you'll see a full analysis of your results (as well as a comparison of how well you did relative to everyone else who has previously taken the test).
Do you have any Programming videos?▼
We've got the following videos on our site to help you to learn Programming:
Learn how to program in Transact-SQL by following this series of tutorials (which roughly reflects the contents of our two-day Introduction to SQL course).
Programming in SQL, including using variables, writing stored procedures and working with CTEs and temporary tables (this mirrors the contents of our advanced SQL course).
Learn how to program in Excel VBA (this tutorial series is an alternative to attending our VBA course). There are lots more specialist VBA training videos listed in our dedicated VBA videos page, and some more specific to Excel on our Excel videos page.
