Word 97 Macro & VBA Handbook [With CDROM]

"Word 97 Macro and VBA Handbook" is an excellent tutorial for people who have limited experience with Visual Basic. It is also an outstanding Word VBA reference book. (The index is unbeatable.) Lots of very useful examples, with analyses. In particular, the CD contains a complete example which showed me how to do something which Microsoft Premier Support said was impossible (activating macros in Word 97 docs from within an Outlook 97 form). The book isn't perfect, though. For example, the three page section on "Disabling Screen Updating" describes the pros and cons in depth, advises one to do it generally, but doesn't illustrate how to do it. I reread the section many times before turning to VB Help, which had the answer. Overall, though, a great reference, which was just the right tool for a difficult project I completed involving passing information from an Outlook 97 Task form to Word 97 forms.

The ideal audience for this book is a person who is trying to learn Word 97 macros and wants a good introduction into Visual Basic for Applications. This book does not assume you know anything about the topic. But if you are a Word expert, this book is still very useful to learn Word 97 macros - just skip the first 140 pages on Word concepts and go right into the macro and VBA stuff. There are 650 more pages that cover a lot of ground.So far I have read through the first half of this book. I have found the explanations clear and straightforward. There are also tutorial exercises to work through, which is a great way to learn.I would say this book gives a good, thorough treatment of the topic. It will give you the skills to write fairly powerful Word macros. But if you are already an experienced Visual Basic programmer, you may want to look elsewhere for a more technical explanation of advanced topics.

I bought this book to help me understand the new object model in Word. I had previously programmed Word6.0 using WordBasic. The first 150 pages is useful for someone without any experience in Word, but for someone with experience, it is unneeded except for the few pages that discuss Forms.The rest of the 770 pages are spent explaining Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the word object model and how to automate a Word document (the reason I bought it). This book provides an adequate intro to generic VBA subjects and more importantly, covers a lot of VBA info that is specific to Word97 only.All of the basics (pardon the pun) of VBA are covered from recording and editing programs using the Visual Basic editor to creating a form and adding controls to it. Also covered are conditional statements, working with variables, strings and constants, and working with files and folders.At least 200 pages are spent talking about Word97 specific topics from a programming! ! point of view, such as the specifics of the Word object model, working with text objects such as Ranges and Selected text, using Find and Replace, working with Fields, Form Fields, and Bookmarks.I was disappointed by the Index on many occasions, it sometimes fails to list what I would consider to be important topics. It also is in a font point size that is too small to read without glasses.This book provides no information about creating your own custom objects in VBA. For that you will need the VBA Developer's Handbook by Ken Getz and Mike Gilbert.All in all a very worthwhile book, I would recommend it to anyone looking to learn how to automate a Word document or even experienced VBA programmers needing to know about the Word object model.

I bought this book to help me customize Microsoft Word 97 and integrate it with other Office applications. I was unfamiliar with VB, let alone VBA. It's a good reference.I also bought "Using Visual Basic For Applications 5", another good reference.

As an experienced Visual Programmer, I started on Chapter 11. Later I went back and read the entire text. I would also recommend Microsoft Office 97 Visual Basic Programmer's Guide if you need to control your application from Visual Basic. All the VBA language runs from a Visual Basic module.