Excel 2003 Programming Inside Out review

Verdict:

Review Date: 18 May 2004

Price when reviewed: ISBN 0735619859

Reviewed By: Mike Bedford

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

This is the latest book from Microsoft Press on programming Excel 2003 but it could soon become obsolete as Microsoft moves from VBA to .NET to develop Office.

Even so, VBA is currently the only realistic option, and this book by Curtis Fry, Wayne Freeze and Felicia Buckingham is a good introduction. It's a big book with enough pages for the pace to be slow and chatty. There are lots of small examples, helpful tips and cautions.

It starts with first principles and explains how to program in VBA before moving on to consider the Excel object hierarchy. If you already program in Visual Basic you might find it best to skip these early sections. As well as the Excel-specific objects it deals with the more general topic of VBA forms.

The later sections deal with more advanced or newer features of Excel 2003. For example, if you have mastered the ideas of PivotTables and PivotCharts you will like the use of VBA to provide dynamic views of data. There is also the inevitable coverage of ADO to access databases and the new XML features of Excel 2003.

If you want to learn VBA from scratch and plan to use it with Excel 2003, you will find this book easy to read and helpful. A CD is bound into the back, which contains the complete text of the book, the sample files and a free copy of the book Insiders' Guide to Office OneNote 2003. A thorough, well-produced introduction to VBA programming.

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