Microsoft Excel/Visual Basic Step by Step

This is one of the best computer books I have ever read. I hesitated to buy a "tutorial" type book, but the Excel/Visual Basic book that came with MS Office was not sufficient. Reed Jacobson's writing style was excellant! He made good use of analogies between real world events and Excel/Visual Basic. His use of the Macro Recorder was a clever way to familiarize the reader to the Visual Basic language. Although meant to be a "tutuorial" type book, this book provided the best explanations of objects, procedures and methods that I have found in any book. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to increase their efficiency in Excel through customization (i.e., programming w/ Visual Basic)

I would recommend this book to anyone who is reasonably accomplished with Excel (or similar) and needs/wants to get more out of the spreadsheet program. For me, it has also proven to be an excellent way to grasp more of the fundamentals of Visual Basic at a quicker pace than the VB3 / VB4 books I have. Mr. Jacobsen (Jacobson?) uses some occasional light humor and rarely uses computer jargon in his book. I really appreciate the emphasis he places on using the macro recorder when convenient to substitute for extensive typing. He also demonstrates that if you don't know how to code something, you can use the macro recorder (which records in Visual Basic code) and then read the generated code. We just began the upgrade to Office 97 at work; when it gets to my machine I'll purchase the next edition of this book so I can keep one copy at home and one at work