I teach a short session on moving analysis from Excel to SQL. Many power Excel users make the jump pretty smoothly. Once you get them thinking about a work flow moving from one table to another, they get it.

But we're talking here about some very bright people accustomed basically hacking the one thing they know to get results. It's a subset of "Excel users" generally.

> I've been thinking recently about how hard it would be to teach a real programming language to Excel users. They would already have some grasp of functions, arrays, and variables.

A not-insignificant part of my previous job was training Excel users to use non-Excel reporting and analysis tools. I believe I can say honestly say that 100% of them had no idea of arrays or variables, and only about a third of them even used the built-in Excel functions.

* They would already have some grasp of functions, arrays, and variables.*

You are very optimistic here... Very optimistic. My guess is that 90% of excel users are at a maximum using the sorting button.