Customer Reviews

Absolute Beginner's Guide to VBA

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The book is what it says: for ABSOLUTE beginners. If you have some computer experience and a working knowledge of the MS Office suite and you are ready to begin leveraging the power of VBA, this book is for you. If you are afraid of VBA, have tried VBA before and failed, or know nothing about programming, this book is for you. I found the book to be of the appropriate length ~350 pages or so. There was also plenty of side bar information that did a great job of explaining WHY you would or would not want to do something. Coverage also included "good to know" gotchas that would definately cause a beginner some heartburn.

The Good:

The book starts out with the obvious introductory items like recording macros, building custom macros, programming control structures (if-then, for loops, etc). The book also has an entire chapter that covers "objects". They are well written, easy to follow, and definately target the beginner.

At about Chapter 7 the book begins dedicating one chapter to each of the MS Office (2000) suite - starting with Word. Then Excel, Powerpoint, Access, and even a chapter on Outlook. All the chapters had good BEGINNER examples. The chapter that covers Access has an example of how to move data between Excel and Access - quite useful.

The last few chapters cover more intermediate topics like debugging, custom dialogs, and toolbars. As before, the book does a good job of introducing and illustrating (through useable examples) how to do the task at hand.

All chapters and examples are on topic. Little or no author dialog, no extemporaneous page fill, and no pay-per-page bloat to distract you from the code.

The Bad:

Coverage of each of the specific Office applications is good for a BEGINNER and given the obvious limitations of an introductory book, so don't expect that you are getting a great Excel programming book or an outstanding Access programming book. The Access examples use ADO which is not a bad thing by itself, but the examples use a fairly advanced coding format (short-cut notation) that many beginners may find hard to follow. The Access chapter and code examples leave out most if not all coverage of integrating "Forms" and "Reports" into your VBA code, which is a huge miss IMHO - minus half star. Coverage of printing and print formatting information with VBA is (or is nearly) nonexistent - minus half star.

If you are already familiar with VBA and you are looking for a beginners VBA book for a specific Office product, this may not be the book for you.

If you have always been intimidated by VBA or you "just never could get the hang of it", this is definately the book for you.

Excellent value for the price.

CM

After the first 30 pages I got frustrated enough to write this review. Obviously the author does not know that the best strategy to teach a beginner is to use examples and present ideas gradually in the context of complete examples. By page 10 you have procedures, modules, functions, projects and details of how to use a project module with the same name in a different project! Terrible teaching indeed. The side notes and other boxed pedogogical styles are as badly abstract and procedural as the main text. I have gone back and forth for clarification several times and to me that is not a good presentation.

This book is where to start if you are trying to automate Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access. It covers each application's object model (with practical examples) which gives you the confidence to develop in each application.

Absolute Beginner's Guide to VBA's main stength is its conciseness (only ~400 pages with lots of pictures). It is very easy to read; I read the book in 10 hours.

There is only one additional subject that should have been covered in an introductory book: starting applications from within another application - i.e. starting PowerPoint from within Access. The clearest explanation of this topic is in the book "Office XP Development with VBA". I also recommend this book.

I think I would qualify as an intermediate user of Access, and was looking to broaden my horizons by learning VBA. After a few chapters of this book, I couldn't continue with it. I found the author's technique of "here's a lot of information, but you don't know enough to use it yet, but it's still very important so don't forget it" to be a bit annoying. I would much rather the author goes through the basics with me, rather than jump ahead and hope I can remember what he's said once I can apply the knowledge four chapters later. Also annoying were the "funny" pictures of people scattered throughout the book - this was enough to steer me away from this series of books forever.

I really was disappointed with this book. It lacks for complete examples and details that show how to implement and use VBA functions, commands, and procedures presented in this book. It was hard for me to implement and use most of the Objects, Methods, Properties, etc presented in this book. The readers need to see complete examples in order to understand how it works.

This book is suppose to be for beginners, however, it is a more descriptive book of VBA objects, methods, etc rather than a teaching book that takes the reader step by step through the learning process.

A lot of typos especially in Excel functions or commands which confused me and wasted a lot of my time trying to find the correct function. I think it is not worth buying it.

This books has almost no useful code, and does not go into enough depth to demonstrate how to write any useful code. Fortunately, I found everything I needed on several VBA websites. I wish I had saved the $18.95...

This is really "the absolute beginners guide to VBA" the title says it all. It provides an excellent way to familiarize yourself with the basics of the language. I bought this book because another VBA book (AutoCAD VBA 2004) was a little over my head, and now i have a feel for the language which enables me to understand the other book. however, this book talks about the basics of the language, with brief introductions to Office applications. in order to actually program in Word, Excel, etc. you should probably buy another book explaining, in detail, the objects associated with those programs.

I came to this book about two years ago after about a year of VBA programming in Excel. At the time I was mostly hoping to learn how to automate Outlook and Word from Excel. Although I enjoyed the book and found it to be fairly straightforward reading, I didn't walk away feeling I had picked up the skills to succeed with the automation tasks I was hoping to work on.

In coming back to the book on a few occasions since my first reading, I've found the book had more to offer than I absorbed on first reading. The organization is good; the code samples are practical and to the point; the style of writing ease clear and easy to follow.

Still, the book does seem to skip a lot of foundation and details. I'd recommend it as an introduction, with the intent of following up with a book that addresses whatever topics you are primarily interested in learning in greater detail.

This author has a clear way of explaining the full realm of VBA using all Microsoft Office applications. The hard part is that its not really for the ABSOLUTE beginner. Another problem is that through each step of his writing he makes the assumption that you have a specific need for that specific portion of VBA's abilities and then goes on explaining it like your just going to be able to apply it to your personal programming needs. The sad part is that the author took no time to create a hands on approach so that you could understand and self apply. I would go with a different beginners guide.

This is a fantastic book. It is definitely for absolute beginners but not to the host application for which you want to use it.

It is for absolute beginners in VBA.

If you already develop advanced applications at macro levels, this book is definetily for you. Even if you don't it's a great book and you will learn VBA, but you'll get more out of it if you have a medium to advance knowledge in the host application you want to use: Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and all other vendors who have bought the licenses to use VBA.

I'd buy this book, even if you already are a power user in office applications. It gives you the basics of VBA as the language unbiased from application-specific orientaton.