Jacob Menninga’s
Website
Hello everyone,
My name is Jacob Menninga, and welcome to my website.
Please pardon the rudimentary format. I didn’t pay extra for a website builder.
Microsoft Excel VBA Portfolio
Below are links to some Excel macro files that I built to showcase my skills with VBA.
Disclaimer:
download macro-enabled Excel files at your own risk. I didn’t add any code that
deletes all the contents of your drive, but I could have!
Remember the old desktop adding machines? They would automatically put the decimal two characters before the end of the line; so you never had to type the decimal manually. Here is my Excel emulation of that machine.
Just press Enter twice in a row to calculate the sum!
Test your keystrokes per minute (KPM) on the 10-key number pad.
The decimal is automatically placed two digits out (like on the adding machine above).
Math Phenomena
Have you heard of an Ulam Spiral?
Click the link to learn more, and see what it looks like!
The Dragon Curve is a fractal shape generated by recursively repeating a simple function.
The Heighway Dragon was featured in a book by Michael Crichton called Jurrasic Park.
Games
Memory Match is a game where you turn over two tiles at a time and try to find all the matches in the fewest number of moves.
If you only download one of these files, please make it this one. It’s fun.
Bejeweled was the precursor to Candy Crush.
I bet you haven’t played it in Excel.
Check out those graphics!
Mastermind is the game we played before Wordle was invented.
Download the file and click the “New” button to see the instructions.
Have you heard of Mad Libs? Would you like to play them in Excel?
I’ve prepared nine unique libs for you to discover. Have fun!
Life Genesis was an old Microsoft game based on John Conway’s Game of Life.
Play against the AI that I designed. It always finds the very best move in the short term. Can you think ahead and beat it?
Splendor is a board game designed by Marc André and published by Space Cowboys, Asmodee.
Would you like to play Splendor using only Microsoft Excel? It requires two players, because I haven’t got the AI working just yet.
Snake is a game where you play as a snake. You eat apples, and when you eat an apple, you get longer and longer.
This is my rendition of a snake game where you progress through a series of rooms of ever-increasing size.
Type in how many rows and columns are visible on your screen (so that the game knows when to start scrolling your view).
Church
I sometimes preach from the pulpit at my church.
Here’s a video of that.
Other
Below are some other projects I’ve worked on.
I used Excel VBA to build a calculator for the game Satisfactory by Coffee Stain Studios.
In the game of Satisfactory, you might have trouble figuring out exactly how many of each machine you need to build in order to produce a high-tier item at a consistent rate. This tool will help you plan that out.
Hearthstone Discover
Simulator
For players of Hearthstone by Activision Blizzard, I used Microsoft Access and VBA to build a database, which allows you to simulate what it would be like to use the “Discover” mechanic in the game. There is also a mode where the name of the card will be hidden, and you need to see if you can guess the name. Do you know Hearthstone well enough to name all three?
The database was last updated in 2023, so it does not have the more recent expansions, nor does it reflect more recent card changes.
Business Money Hacks is my favorite podcast.
As a fan, I’ve done some video editing work to create clips of the podcast using images and animation. These videos were featured in a playlist on the official Business Money Hacks YouTube channel.
I’ve also taken the time to transcribe a few episodes, and I used Microsoft Word VBA to write macros to aid in the transcription process.