Reference Excel Books : Excel 2000 VBA Programmer s Reference

Excel 2000 VBA Programmer s Reference

£5.95


Wrox s growing reputation for putting out well-organised, detail-rich books for programmers gets a boost from Excel 2000 VBA Programmer s Reference. This book--a tutorial as well as a reference--holds a wealth of chewy facts that Excel developers will find very valuable. The tutorial, accounting for half of the book, covers the various mechanisms available for referring to particular files, sheets, cells and ranges of cells. It also addresses the graphical representation of data--particularly in charts--and explains the most important aspects of controls and the events they generate. Green--unlike many VBA authors--covers internationalisation issues in considerable depth. This is the best VBA book on the market for those planning to write programs for a multilingual usage of Excel. There is also a VBA primer that covers critical VBA syntax and the essentials of object-orientation as it applies to the Excel environment. The two reference sections--one for Excel s VBA objects and one for the VBA Extensibility (VBE) environment--make up the last half of Excel 2000 VBA Programmer s Reference. The references are comprehensive, but they re organised in a strange way--they list properties, methods and events with their names, return data types and descriptions in columns. This would be okay, but when an object s list of members extends over several pages it s impossible to be immediately sure of which object the list refers to. The object name ought to appear on each page. --David Wall

Fuse This Reference With MSDN Library For Scorching Results... - Love it!With its vintage coffee stains (circa 2002) and more dog ears than a Kelly Brook Calendar this little number has survived numerous contracts across the UK. I would suggest the target market would be someone who has an average understanding of Excel AND has recorded macro s in the past and messed around with a little VBA. This is a REFERENCE BOOK and a REFERENCE BOOK only - it is NOT designed to teach VBA (though it does cover a bit at the beginning.) I liked the orders of the pages too e.g. years ago whilst flicking through RANGES brought up OFFSET and RESIZE examples that helped me rethink my entire code a rapidly solve a coding challenge, which is great considering I d never thought of using these in the first place!I found the index at the back a bit, well, odd, nevertheless I combine this volume with the MSDN library online for maximum effect!IF you code at home, work or play, keep this valuable tome by your side at all times!!!

Potentially fantastic resource let down by bad index - This book should be the answer to many a programmer s prayers. There is a little of everything in here and you ll certainly learn a bit simply by reading it. One for the bookshelf? Well yes, in addition to several other texts, but then there are no books I know of in the XL world that can stand alone and yes I ve bought a copy. (In the XL world there simply isn t the equivalent of the books by Getz, Litwin et al for Access and most fall far short.) Summit:The encyclopaedic Chapter 2 The primer is an excellent educational tool. It s very important in XL, like everywhere else, to learn how to program decent code. However one doesn t generally have the baby-walker that is Record Macro facility from where many a nipper (including this reviewer) set out on the quest for Excel mastery. But the time eventually comes when one has to learn to walk properly and this chapter alone is a valuable contribution to anyone seeking to throw away the crutches of the early toddler years.Sink:The index is horrible since pre-assumes a prior knowledge of the xl object model - one simple example...to find out about the cells (property) don t look in C look in R - because as you will know the Cells property is a property of the Range object. Since everyone knows this - this is fine - however as you approach the boundaries of your knowledge (as you will if you re learning anything) such a set up is frustrating.-Verdict: Excellent book, but mistitled - should read Excel 2000 VBA - a primer. And a fine primer it is too! (But don t annoy yourself by trying to learn a la help file using reference indexes though and you ll like the book a lot.)

Nice try, but it falls between too many stools - For an experienced VBA programmer, this book probably offers relatively little. The introduction claims it s aimed at all levels, but as a near-beginner I found it WAY too skimpy. I still can t follow how to set up a user form from code in a way that actually works. The authors grapple well with the sheer complexity and lack of logic of the object-oriented approach to writing code, but many more painstaking examples and step by steps are needed to make the whole thing truly clear. On balance the book is almost certainly at its best for the reader with middle-of-the-road VBA experience: there are many useful hints for writing code that runs much faster (and is shorter) than the traditional select range and operate approach that results from recording macros in Excel. Regrettably the book hasn t solved any of my own problems I hoped it would. Downloading the selection of macros from the Wrox website hasn t helped either.

Very good - highly recommended - Very well written and easy to follow, it answered a whole collection of my questions within 1/2 a hour of opening it. If you have already mastered menu handling, classes and the object model then this book is not for you but if you have written some VBA and want to start cleaning it up to a more resilient standard then this is perfect. Wrox or the authors need to come up with an advanced version of this book which covers areas such as Odbc and External data sources, Excel internals with a view to speeding up code and some of the more useful but esoteric functions available within Excel.

A curate s egg - This book does have some very useful parts - e.g. the chapter on international settings - though even there the problem with failure to recognise a number input as % is repeated mentioned, but no workaround is proposed. There are some useful tips on gotchas. I found it very light in dealing with User Defined Functions - no indication as to how to create and use a function that returns an array result, or how to programme function help for the user trying to understand the arguments and purpose of a function for instance. Also no coverage of using compiled .dll for additional speed in computationally intensive tasks, and how to pass data to and fro to those.




Excel 2000 VBA Programmer s Reference