Product Description

Updated for Excel 2002, this text offers Excel power-users, as well as programmers who are unfamiliar with the Excel object model, with an introduction to writing Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros and programs for Excel. In particular, the book focuses on: the Visual Basic Editor and the Excel VBA programming environment. Excel features a complete , state-of-the-art integ rated development environment for writing, running, testing, and debugging VBA macros. The VBA programming language, the same programming language used by the other applications in Microsoft Office XP and 2000, as well as by the retail editions of Visual Basic 6.0. The Excel object model, including new objects and new members of existing objects in Excel 2002. Excel exposes nearly all of its functionality through its object model, which is the means by which Excel can be controlled programmatically using VBA. While the Excel object model, with 192 objects, is the second largest among the Office applications, you need to be familiar with only a handful of objects to write effective macros. Writing Excel Macros focuses on these essential objects, but includes a discussion of many more objects as well.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32212 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

James E. Powell, The Office Letter, September 2002
'Writing Excel Macros' is definitely the place to begin to when you're ready to delve into macros. Strongly recommended."

From the Publisher
To achieve the maximum control and flexibility from Microsoft® Excel™ often requires careful custom programming using the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) language. Writing Excel Macros with VBA, 2nd Edition offers a solid introduction to writing VBA macros and programs, and will show you how to get more power at the programming level: focusing on programming languages, the Visual Basic Editor, handling code, and the Excel object model.

About the Author
Steven Roman is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the California State University, Fullerton. His previous books with O'Reilly include Access Database Design and Programming, Writing Excel Macros, and Win32 API Programming with Visual Basic.

Customer Reviews

Rather inscrutable
I was attracted by the author's 'terse' style and comprehensive approach. The concept of breaking VBA down into its core components and laying these out for the reader is great. [ie as compared to going through standard basic VBA apps]. In practice though I found this rather unfathomable. I've used this book during my [rather painful] VBA initiation period and found it ranging from almost impossible to understand [at the start] to potentially helpful and quite comprehensive for those aspects that I've not seen covered elsewhere [4 months later]. I do think it promises a lot but because its objective is to really delve into how vba works, it doesn't quite bridge the gap between vba environment and applications. I constantly refer to it but find it difficult to extract much detailed information, although i am finding more and more 'titbits' which make sense. I think one day it will all open up and reveal its treasures to me, but on the other hand, it may never make much sense. In the meantime, I've had to buy another VBA book which focuses more on the apps side.

Wonderful Training Manual
As a professional trainer this is a book I highly recommend to delegates. Not only covers the Excel specific parts of VBA but also covers the general principles and good practice techniques of programming.

Good examples, clear explanations, a good book to support anyone learning VBA.

Not impenetrable - Just ram-packed
Well, other reviewers have said it's a hard book to get to grips with. Whilst this is probably true if you have little/no programming experience at all, for those of us who do and who dont want to wade through massive chapters on "what is a variable" again, this book is a godsend. With a background in OO languages, I found I could just pick this book up, and get coding pretty much straight away. It is concise, but that's a good thing i think, and is generally par for the course with O'Reilly who do tend to target the experienced coder.