Microsoft Office Programming: A Guide for Experienced Developers

This book is the book you need to get you going when you want to use two or more office applications in your own home brewed apps. This book doesn't drag you through learning the basics of VBA but,takes you straight to the meat and potatoes of office development. Shows you the differences in the object models and ways you can use those differences. It helped me restructure a few access applications to add value and greater functionality to them in my organization. I learned how I could use Excel as a report writer using preformated workbooks and the same with Word. If you want to know more about meshing office apps together without reading through material you already know then this is the book you need.

Microsoft has done an excellent job of integrating its Office suite of products. So if you are familiar with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), you can use it to programmatically perform tasks within each Office product, like Excel, Word or Powerpoint. Or, within one of these products, you can write an application that can invoke an instance of another program. Within one book, Stephens shows an efficient and unified way to learn how to do all this, and more. The trick is to be able to use VBA as a macro programming language. This is the key to understanding and using MS Office as a coherent entity. Ultimately, Stephens suggests that it is quicker than learning how to program each product on a case-by-case basis. Stephens cheerfully dumps on other texts that call you an idiot or dummy. (If you know what I mean.) He unabashedly expects you to be conversant in VB or VBA. To be specific, he doesn't waste time going over the elementary syntactical points of VBA. So you don't have to thumb through these pages in idle frustration. He drags you rapidly into non-trivial coding explanations of how to use VBA to get at MS Office.