You can record Macro in Excel to do jobs automatically without writing VBA. VBA is a simplified version of Microsoft Visual Basic.
I am still using the Office 2007 so I am not sure whether the newer versions of VBA have been updated to .NET framework.
Your approach can be still used for many real world researches. However, the COVID-19 is the hottest topic right now and all supercomputer centers and large computer companies offer computing time to do the big data analysis and modeling. Hence, most professors will instruct their Ph. D. students to stay away from COVID-19 and choose another topic for their Ph. D. thesis.
In your case, you can still use the COVID-19 data to help to dig deep into Excel.
HaHaHello2020-05-07 08:18:22
11,433 new cases and 645 new deaths in Brazil
Brazil has joined USA and Russia to have 10,000+ new cases!
South Korea +4 cases & 1 death - - > 10810 cases & 256 deaths
天坦迪阿堤斯2020-05-07 10:33:29
由day one已經話係傳染率勁唔係死亡率勁
後遺症就未知
喇叭吧2020-05-07 10:59:22
Did play with Macro and VBA but found that PowerQuery (need Excel 2010) can done a lot for data cleaning and processing. Best of all, I don't need to deal with the security issue.
I am now treating a cell as a variable, a formula as a functions, a range as an array/matrix. Those building blocks are good enough for programming within a worksheet (no idea if it is Turing complete).
In the future release, there will be a let() formula that allows us to pass a formula as an first order function in it but that's for another story.