Customer Reviews

Word 2003 Document Automation with VBA, XML, XSLT, and Smart Documents (Wordware Applications Library)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Quite often you see book titles that unfortunately do not match the subject content. This one certainly does! The back cover states that it sets out to explain how to:

- Automate documents with a minimum of programming by using Word's native functionality
- Use VBA to create document automation solutions
- Record macros, create automated templates, format and manipulate files using Word and build documents dynamically
- Create, edit and format XML documets
- Develop smart documents solutions to guide users through a variety of repetitive tasks
- Transform XML using WordprocessingML, XSLT, XPath, smart documents and web services technologies

Ok, to be fair I didn't find anything on web services explicitly but it still gets us over 99% of the way through delivering on its expectations.

This book has hit a niche area for word users wanting to create smarter documents with no other book providing coverage of this subject matter as intimately or in a way as easy to follow as this book. It is perfect for people who routinely have to write legal contracts, functional specifications and general technical documentation as it allows you to fully leverage off Word's capabilities in letting you work smarter.

I did not own any other books by Wordware and this seemed to be a bit out there in their list of publications so I was initially a bit hesitant about buying this book. As it turns out I shouldn't have been! Scott Driza presents the subject matter well and in a very succint way - this book has just over 400 pages in which it manages to cover quite a lot of ground!

I bought this book primarily to concentrate on the XML, XSLT and Smart Documents features, but have found that I even picked up a trick or two in relation to VBA-based templates. For those who like using shortcut keys, Appendix A will be a God send as it has the most exhaustive list of Word commands and shortcut keys I have ever seen!

The book devotes approximately half of its pages to VBA and assumes no prior knowledge of VBA, XML, XSLT or Smart Documents. It doesn't cover all subject areas exhaustively but it gets you started and tells you where to get additional materials.

I would have liked to have seen a bit more detail on XML schemas although the the book does show you how to get Word to automatically generate an inferred schema based on XML mark-up. That is pretty much the only reason why I didn't give it a 5-star rating.

If you are an IT professional, engineer, lawyer, technical writer or any other type of knowledge worker; do yourself a favour - stop creating your documents the hard way and buy this book. It will more than pay for itself the first time you start applying the concepts, techniques and technologies it refers to.

This is one of the least useful books I have read in my 10+ years in the IT business. Written from an academic standpoint, there were few useful examples offered and no subject was discussed in enough detail to be useful. Examples were vauge at best.

While this book got me excited about the topic of document automation, I am unable to create a custom Smart Document solution from scratch after reading this book from cover to cover.

Buyer beware: This is a "What Is" book, not a "How To" book.

Despite a long personal history with MS Office products and VBA programming, I found this book to be often confusing and poorly organized. Stronger editing could have greatly benefited this book, such as defining terms as soon as they are introduced. While the author sometimes treats the reader like a neophyte, at other times he will suddenly discuss a complex topic in detail using undefined terms and technical language a beginner would not understand. He also often creates examples that certainly require some introduction but lack it, and uses figures without referencing them in the text. I found myself having to frequently look at other sources of information to understand what he was talking about.

That is not say the book is a complete waste. There is good information here, but you have to work pretty hard to make sense of it because of the disorganized discussion of topics, particularly the Word 2003 object model.

Overall, I found the book disappointing, and regret the purchase.

Pretty good book. More code examples would have been better. One thing to note is that I don't necessarily think this book would be good for a brand new beginner.

I've read the majority of the content of this book and I have found it to be very useful. The author's coverage of the basic of WordProcessML is excellent. The first seven chapters contain good examples of how to automate Word.