Excel Programming: Your Visual Blueprint for Creating Interactive Spreadsheets

This book is excellent for people who already know their way around Excel and need to get started with macro programming fast. Those wanting to continue to advanced macro programming will undoubtedly want to move on to another book, but I think this is a fantastic way to get going. I found the formatting (2-page sections) very convenient.

I am a programmer and frequently work with many people that are not. This book is great to grab the CD and share a concept or share an idea. The entire book is on CD-ROM in the back of the book that by the way is in PDF format so that you can enlarge it to almost 400 percent (so much for readability issues). I thought initially that this book was highly duplicitous of its brother book Excel Data Analysis by the same company. There are some areas that overlap but I will pass on criticism.Every example has the initial worksheet and the solved or worked through example on the included cd-rom. If there is any room they could have done better with, is using a larger font and pulling out what example they are using from the top of the excel worksheet onto the page. Therefore, when you open to the topic of "Record a Macro" they would have had "Budget Worksheet" example in the same font size next to it. As it currently is, there is a bit of eyestrain but it is not that bad.

Excellent book for people who need to learn the two object models quickly while providing a strait to the point explanation, and an example of how to use it in you project. This has to be one of the best self-study books around.

To put my review into context: I used to be able to write useful Excel macros in the old Excel 4.0 / Excel 95 macro language. I'm not a programmer, and certainly not an advanced macro user, but I could use the old language to do what I needed to do: mostly just speeding or automating routine Excel tasks. When VBA replaced the 4.0 macro language, I tried for years to understand it, but VBA just never clicked with me. I never needed it so badly that I would put myself on a course, or plough through a dense text book, though I did routinely look (without success) for something that would help me to get my head round the format.Finally I came across this book in a bookstore, and it instantly began to make sense. I started by just looking through the text in the store, and going back to my PC to use what I had learned. By my third time back to the store for more tips, I realized that this was actually what I needed and bought the book. I am now comfortable with the format, and still learning through writing simple VBA's as and when I need them. I attribute this entirely to this book.I recommend it to anyone who, as I did, just finds the whole VBA format daunting. The book's format is very visual - much more so than other VBA books (including "VBA For Dummies", which I own, but which didn't help me at all). This (visual format) means that each topic is very quick to learn, and you're not left wondering how you can use a particular function. Each function is described in very "bite-sized" sections, mostly two facing pages, and occasionally four. Each two page topic is at most half text, with the rest screen-shots and comments on the screen-shots. It just really works well.By all means get another VBA macro manual as a reference, but if you really want to get started in the format without also getting put off by it, this book is the only one that I have found that fits the bill.

For some time, I have wanted to program in Visual Basic for Applications as a means to automate Excel 2000/2002. I have looked at many titles in the bookstore by various authors (experts in the field, unquestionably), but none seem targeted to the novice or intermediate user who simply wants to understand the VBA environment and how to benefit from its powerful capabilities. If other books were trying to target such an audience, then they suffered from poor readability and simply too much material. This book instills confidence in novice users as the reader is given very succinct explanations on variables, procedures, subroutines/functions, and, of course, the Excel Object Model. I have not been able to put the book down, practically speaking. Extremely well organized, with generally very good and detailed graphics. It makes its point in roughly 325 pp. and features an excellent appendix dealing with constants, etc. I believe this book will forever relegate the more pricey books I have on the subject to a shelf in my technical library. The others are authoritative books, to be sure, but I never gained confidence with the format. Reading other sources proved exhausting when compared to this book. As an Excel user who wrote some macros in the Excel 95 version of the software, this book is a welcome addition. The book contains probably a few typos, and perhaps an illustration or two (screen shots of the Excel or VB Editor interface) is unclear or improperly rendered (such as in the section "Remove a Module"). Minor, minor details that won't matter in the overall scheme of things - this book rates very high in my opinion. Another plus: the CD ROM has the sample code used in many sections in the book as well as an "e-version" of the book itself.