You would pretty much have to learn one of the programming languages like Visual Basic.
In my younger days, when I had more brain cells and more patience I learned to program in Turbo Pascal, and actually wrote some pretty useful programs (one in particular is still being used by people today). Now, I just don't have the attention span.
Anyway, you might want to get a beginners book on visual basic and see if it is something you think you could take to.
I learned Basic, Pascal and some C++ on my own. You start out writing simple "Hello World" programs, then learn from there. Most programming languages have "libraries" that contain common sub-routines that you can include without writing them from the ground up.
Here is a Wikipedia article on Visual Basic: