Newly updated for Excel 2002, Writing Excel Macros with VBA, 2nd Edition provides Excel power-users, as well as programmers who are unfamiliar with the Excel object model, with a solid introduction to writing Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros and programs for Excel. In particular, the book focuses on:

• The Visual Basic Editor and the Excel VBA programming environment. Excel features a complete, state-of-the-art integrated development environment for writing, running, testing, and debugging VBA macros.

The VBA programming language, the same programming language used by the other applications in Microsoft Office XP and 2000, as well as by the retail editions of Visual Basic 6.0. The Excel object model, including new objects and new members of existing objects in Excel 2002. Excel exposes nearly all of its functionality through its object model, which is the means by which Excel can be controlled programmatically using VBA. While the Excel object model, with 192 objects, is the second largest among the Office applications, you need to be familiar with only a handful of objects to write effective macros. Writing Excel Macros focuses on these essential objects, but includes a discussion of many more objects as well. Writing Excel Macros with VBA, 2nd Edition is written in a terse, no-nonsense manner that is characteristic of Steven Roman's straightforward, practical approach. Instead of a slow-paced tutorial with a lot of handholding, Roman offers the essential information about Excel VBA that you must master to write macros effectively. This tutorial is reinforced by interesting and useful examples that solve common problems you're sure to have encountered. Writing Excel Macros with VBA, 2nd Edition is the book you need to delve into the basics of Excel VBA programming, enabling you to increase your power and productivity.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 20 Ratings

Good reference book for experienced macro writers - 2008-10-22
Reviewer Rating:
This book is very helpfull to understand the objectmodel from Microsoft Excel and VBA. After reading this book it is much easier to write efficient code.

Excellent coverage of Excel object model - 2008-11-26
Reviewer Rating:
There are a number books on VBA and on programming Excel with VBA. Some of these are quite good and have many useful examples. However, once one understands the basic techniques, accomplishing one's goal primarily requires detailed knowledge of the Excel object model. One can dig through the object browser and/or the Microsoft documentation for this information or use the macro recorder as a 'prototyping' shortcut, but these techniques are somewhat time consuming and are less than complete.

This book's coverage of the Excel object model is by the far the best I have seen and is well organized and through. It explains the intent of the properties and methods rather than just explaining the syntax.

The author also details various caveats about how various components within the object model operate. This is very useful. As a simple example, he explains that setting the Chart objects .HasAxis property before the Chart has any data series defined will result in a cryptic error that is not covered in the documentation. Without this information one might end up blindly copying some ugly code from the macro recorder that seems to work though it wouldn't be clear just why this code worked while the other method failed.

If one is not already very knowledgeable of Excel and VBA, this book would probably work best accompanied by a book like Walkenbach's, "Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA". Eventually however, this will probably become the "goto" reference.

Dull and of no practical help - 2008-04-06
Reviewer Rating:
This book is the equivalent of the eastern-European piano teacher I used to have when I was a kid: proper learning involves strict discipline and sufferance. If you don't read this mind-numbing book from cover to cover, you won't get anything out of it.

I usually love Oreilly books, but this one has simply been useless for me. Time and time again I open it up for help, and I never find any answer.
Actually, last time I looked up a particular topic, it essentially said "You can do it this way, but there are better ways of doing it", and gave no further information. That's what I call useless information.

A Very Good reference bool - 2008-07-22
Reviewer Rating:
It is a very good reference book for excel compared to many other books which do not deal with excel as deeply as this one does. A good book to have.

Decent short-hand reference - 2008-01-17
Reviewer Rating:
Not a bad book but it takes some work to get through the dry parts. I think that the book is decent.

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