I tried a variation of the same approach - thought my girlfriend how to use MS Excel formulas and she became better than I am at it in no time, because she managed to apply it in her job. But how to get her to code still eludes me...
That is what I got the tester/analyst to get away from and use Python instead. Handling data files in Python is far, far more powerful than what you can do with Excel macros. One of the things I am teaching her is to throw Excel, CSV and XML files in SQLite and then validate and query the data.