Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba) by For Dummies Title: Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba)

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Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba) by For Dummies

Informative, but Difficult to Find Information at Times

While I had used this for a course in VBA, and noted that it was an extremely concise text, I found it near useless when I was working on my assignments. This book had the information in it, but oftentimes, I simply could not find this information quickly (if at all), and instead Googled much of my information.

On a positive note, this is a well-written book (note: not well-indexed), and therefore useful if you're learning VBA and exploring each chapter one-at-a-time. If you're looking strictly for a reference book for VBA, however, I would strongly advise against getting this particular text.

Also, this text is not written for beginners (a point that the author makes clear), even though some of the material in this book could only be for beginners (for example, the introductory VBA material).
Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba) by For Dummies

Strongly recommend Excel 2003 Power Programming

Excellent book for anyone looking to quickly get up and programming VBA in Excel. Don't have to be familiar specifically with Visual Basic but a reasonable knowledge of programming a help. Would have given it 5 stars if it had a thorough reference section on VBA.
Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba) by For Dummies

Excel 2003 PPVBA

Book was helpful in the setup of various 'maintenance' routines. It gave me a fresh look at the use of properties, allowing me to streamline the coding. Unfortunately, company directives have us converting the work to 'active server pages' with a SQL 2005 database server. Since the source data is Oracle, I have been working on DB to DB utilities.
Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba) by For Dummies

It's one of the best Excel book I have.

It's an excellent an useful book. Personally, It's helped me a lot. I recommend to read it, because it has many simple and difficult examples of macros, codes, programming's techniques and functions. Also it teachs about API of Windows . It'll definitely help to be a successful developer on Excel.
Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba) by For Dummies

Bad reference, good intro

This is the first book I read on the subject (I am proficient in other languages/platforms).
It is a decent introduction, and it gives you a good overview of various areas of Excel/VBA programming. There are plenty of code examples and lots of opportunities to get your hands dirty modifying and debugging them.

I was very disappointed by its poor structure and lack of rigour. Concepts are introduced by example in seemingly unrelated chapters, therefore scattering language features all over the place. This, combined with an utterly useless index, means that unless you get a digital copy of the book you will have a very hard time using this book as a reference.

Also, in my opinion, the author has not gone out much using other more sophisticated languages, and this lack of discipline/hacking attitude is often noticeable. Not only in the occasional sloppiness of his code (whoever proof-read this book did an awful job too by the way), but also in the poor explanation of higher features of VBA, for instance class modules, relegated to a 10-page chapter towards the end, whose examples are anyway missing the whole point of stateful encapsulation through class objects. Similarly poorly explained (many chapters earlier, incidentally) is the use of class objects for Application-level events, with the mysterious "With Events" qualifier which is never really explained anywhere.
I often found that the material lacked diagrams and more abstract and general explanations that go beyond the "learn by example" cookbook approach.
Finally, I was annoyed by the frequent, not-so-subliminal adverts to the author's software package, of which a trial is available on the CD.

Overall, it did the job for me - helping me getting to grips with the language and the object model. But if you are already beyond the basics get yourself a good reference, or perhaps Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft(R) Excel and VBA(R) (The Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series), which I have already started reading with interest and seems to explain much more methodically best practices and more advanced concepts - while still not a VBA reference.
Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba) by For Dummies

Product Description

"Today, no accomplished Excel programmer can afford to be without John’s book. The value of Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA is double most other books–simultaneously the premier reference and best learning tool for Excel VBA."
—Loren Abdulezer, Author of Excel Best Practices for Business

Everything you need to know about:

  • Creating stellar UserForms and custom dialog box alternatives
  • Working with VBA subprocedures and function procedures
  • Incorporating event-handling and interactions with other applications
  • Building user-friendly toolbars, menus, and help systems
  • Manipulating files and Visual Basic® components
  • Understanding class modules
  • Managing compatibility issues

Feel the power of VBA and Excel

No one can uncover Excel’s hidden capabilities like "Mr. Spreadsheet" himself. John Walkenbach begins this power user’s guide with a conceptual overview, an analysis of Excel application development, and a complete introduction to VBA. Then, he shows you how to customize Excel UserForms, develop new utilities, use VBA with charts and pivot tables, create event-handling applications, and much more. If you’re fairly new to Excel programming, here’s the foundation you need. If you’re already a VBA veteran, you can start mining a rich lode of programming ideas right away.

CD-ROM Includes

  • Trial version of the author’s award-winning Power Utility Pak
  • Over one hundred example Excel workbooks from the book

System Requirements: PC running Windows® 2000 SP3 or later, or Windows XP™ or later. Microsoft Excel 2003. See the "What’s on the CD" Appendix for details and complete system requirements.