Office 2003 Programming: Real World Applications

If you want to know how to use Office as a development platform for your business applications, then pick a copy of this book. The author shows you how to integrate the Office Product line with databases, web services, and ASP.NET using real-world business situations. I was especially impressed with the service request application that demonstrates how to kick off and manage a workflow using InfoPath and web services. Very useful stuff if you need to push information from your office out to the web. There is also a lot of information on how to build Office Add-Ins, manipulating the conent of Excel documents, building email templates, and creating reports. Overall, very useful, I highly recommend it, and definately worth every penny I paid for it!

The emphasis of the book is given by the subtitle - 'real world applications'. Anderson essentially provides 9 use cases of programming MS Office 2003; one per chapter and written in Visual Basic. These cases can be valuable to you on several levels. Firstly, if you are new to Visual Basic, then the book gives extended examples to improve your understanding. Secondly, and obviously, to see how you can program the various and myriad components of Office 2003, from the UI to accessing a database and using XML. Very nontrivial, as you might appreciate from the level of detail in the chapters. Thirdly, it is to find that one of the chapters actually fills a current need, and so you can just copy its code, perhaps with only some simple changes. While the book certainly suggests you can do this, it may actually be rare in practice.

This is a must have book for anyone who uses MS Office tools. It makes great use of Office 2003 its new .Net integrated features. When the company I work for broke up into business units I suddenly was wearing many hats. With little experience in administation, I quickly began to seek out ways to streamline the process. Try to reduce things like double entrys, nagging action reports, and headaches from poor follow up on sales calls. With that in mind I bought Ty Anderson's book. This book was more advanced than my skill level when I bought it, but it's helped me to finally get a handle on vb.net. The book is chock full of meat and potatoes stuff that bases itself from software I do know, things like excel, word and some access. Like the editorial review says, it has ready to go apps. All you need is Office 2003pro and Visual Studio Tools for Office and your in business. The author does a great job of breaking down the code in a very straight forward, no words wasted kind of way. And provides great apps which offer another way to reverse understand things. I made use of the word doc generator and outlook to organise my client contact info and todo lists. It got me praise and recognition at my work, Now Im a the team leader! A Great investment. Ive bought a whole mess of books trying to filter out usefull stuff. This one is all about usefull applications for Office. If your a novice like me ,it will get you excited about learning to be a developer. If your skill set is more advanced it will be even more usefull, as it provides the building blocks for an endless array of usefull applications. Two thumbs way up.. I'd also recommend Inside Access 2003.