Shapes are the building block of any design. If you want to design a tool, you must use shapes and images not just in excel but in any tool. If you learn the tricks to manipulate shapes in Excel, you'll be able to design beautiful objects and then apply creative animation to them. There are many default shapes in excel to get started and then you can shape them according to your requirement. Graphic designing comes with a lot of practice. The more you practice the beautiful art you can create. So make a habbit to create something new always!

Grouping of shapes is a very important workflow in any graphic designing tool including Excel. Groups can also be applied to VBA codes and thus animated several shapes in a group with just one line of code. So whenever possible group your shapes specially when there are too many shapes in a project. And as you get better with deisgn and animation, you'll start to have tons of shapes and images in your projects.

zOrder has these functions:- 1). Send Backward : Send a shape to backward of the immediate shape behind 2). Send to back: Send a shape to the bottom of the layer system(Behind all shapes). 3). Bring Forward: Bring a shape to front of the immediate shape above. 4) Bring to Front : Bring a shape to the top of the layer system. This shape will be above all the shapes in the worksheet/selection panel/layer sytem. We'll also use this function very frequently through VBA codes in our later chapters.

In this lesson we'll learn what is VBA and it's application. Well VBA is a programming language for Excel and it stands for Visual Basic Application. VBA is primarily used to automate tasks, however in this series of tutorial we'll use VBA to achieve great animations in Excel. Animation in Excel can be achieved only through VBA and they are super easy. You'll learn the VBA basics in this course to create awesome animation. However if you want to use VBA to automate tasks then you need to learn the other side of VBA. There are many VBA tutorials on the Udemy site, you might like to consider one if you want to master VBA. But without animation, no project can be so lively and professional in a project.

Lets get started writing out first macro. This is a simple macro changing the location of a shape from one point o another in Excel. Unlike the crazy codes for automating tasks in Excel, animation codes are pretty straight forward and the result is instant feedback. Its much about being creative.

A variable is a data type that can be changed over a period of time based on conditions. We'll learn how a variable is defined and a how a variable can be called.

As we know now, animation in Excel can be achieved only through VBA. And primarily we animate mostly the shapes/images in Excel as they can be moved around and shapes have tons of properties to animate at different interval of time.In this lesson we'll learn the most important concept called time delay or pausing of time in Excel through VBA. Whenevr there is an animation there is a time factor involved. Without time nothing really can animate. When I reach out to the water bottle, there is a time taken for that activity for that animation. And thus we need to apply a a time delay concept in Excel to give that travel time/time taken time for animation. This time delay macro in this course is called timeFrame and without this no animation can be achieved. It is like keyframe in real life animation softwares. This small chunck of codes called the timeFrame macro needs to be pasted in every animation project and we would not be writing this in any project. Just paste it to all projects. And when we apply this timeFrame macro we can pause time in excel for anytime we tell Excel to pause and when we apply pause time with different time at different locations, points, and other state of properties of shapes, we achieve different variations of animation.

Visible property is one of the most used function in graphic design tool or programming language. It's a Boolean function, simple true or false statement but super useful. We'll be using this function almost in all our projects later in this series of tutorials.

IF functions are logical/conditional reasonings and it is the "The most used" function in any programming language. In this lesson we'll learn to write simple IF logic in the VBA editor and in the later chapters we'll use more IF conditions. Understanding and mastering IF functions will really help you become a better programmer. So go ahead a practice a lot of IF functions beyond this lesson.

There are many ways to run a macro and each way is helpful for different situations. You can run a macro by pushing a button or run a macro based on a change of a cell value or even run a macro as soon a workbook is clicked open like a splash screen. Based on your project requirement you can leverage one of these in your projects.

Recording a macro and checking out the recorded VBA codes is a great way to learn VBA. If you are serious about mastering VBA, get your way out to record different activities. Once recorded, all the codes will be available for you to study. As you would know the activities that you performed, it becomes easy to understand how those activities are translated into codes and how these codes can be reused to automate those activities. So keep recording ideas in your mind and get those codes for use in your project.

Loop functions are extensively used in all programming languages. The tasks of a loop function is to automate the repeated similar tasks. In this lesson we'll learn For Loop function, and this is so helpful that we'll use it it in most of our animation projects. It'll really save you a tons of time writing Excel animation codes.

In this lesson we'll create a simple sliding down menu. This is a very simple code just added some Top points to the shape for downward and upward animations. This kind of menus are seen everywhere in mobile apps, web pages, it really helps to keep your project clean and more interactive and most of all it gives that professional feel to it. You can also create different variations of such menus by checking out some of your favorite mobile apps or webpages. All those variations are possible to be achieved right within Excel! In this lesson we'll design the menu system.

In this part of the Sliding down menu project we'll start to write macros in the VBA editior to add downward and upward animation to the slidingRect our menu.

In this lesson we'll create a real world animation clock. We'll employ the rotation properties of shapes to achieve the clock functionality. To rotate a shape we need understand the pivot point of a shape. By default the shapes' pivot points in excel is at it's own center point. So if we want animate a shape from it's bottom or top edges/pivot points we'll need to group the shape with a circle and then make the circle invisible. We can then use the new group name in the VBA editor to achieve that rotation animation.Shape rotation is one of the most used properties for animation.