Excel 2000 VBA Programmers Reference [Paperback]

John Green (Author), Stephen Bullen (Author), Felipe Martins (Author)

Book Description

Series: Programmer's Reference | Publication Date: April 1999

Excel 2000 is an important part of the Office 2000 program suite, and will be available in the Premium, Professional, Standard and Small Business editions of Office 2000. Excel has traditionally been the Office suite spreadsheet program par excellence. It still remains that way, but with Office 2000 there is a strong emphasis on between-application automation, ease of use, and the smart new bells and whistles that 2000 brings. Using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), the user can program his or her own programs in what is essentially a subset of the Visual Basic programming languages. This is tremendously powerful, as it allows you to create great User Interfaces (forms etc), as a front end to actual spreadsheet and database storage and manipulation. This continues to be one of the great strengths of programming Excel VBA.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Wrox's growing reputation for putting out well-organized, 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 internationalization 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 organized 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

From the Publisher

This book presents a full reference to the Excel object model - which is essentially the object-oriented system of organizing the functional capacities that make up the Excel program. There will be a short introduction to VBA itself, and the rest of the book will document aspects of programming Excel through that object model.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 700 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Pr Inc; 1st edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861002548
• ISBN-13: 978-1861002549
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,742,760 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful Portion is Short, January 12, 2001

By 

johare4 (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Excel 2000 VBA Programmers Reference (Paperback)

Pages 7-254 cover EXCEL and VBA. Pages 257-264 cover "international issues", which has a limited audience in the USA. Pages 289-321 deal with the VBE. Pages 345-630 are a listing of the EXCEL Object Model, which I find none too useful. Likewise, pages 665-695 list the VBE Object Model, again not too useful to me.

This book can be compared to Kofler "Definitive Guide to EXCEL VBA", which is 776 pages of exposition and pages 777-834 a listing of the most useful parts of the EXCEL Object Model, ADO, MS forms, Office, Binder, Scripting, VBA and VBE. Thus, you get a much more extensive discussion of how things work and how things fit together than is found in Green (or in Walkenbach, for that matter). Kofler also deals with international issues here and there. However, Green is a lot cheaper, and sometimes its compactness makes it easier to find things.

Bottom line: Buy Green first (cheapest), Kofler second and Walkenbach last

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars COMMENTS FROM A BEGINNER, June 10, 2002

By 

SGT_Sweety - See all my reviews

This review is from: Excel 2000 VBA Programmers Reference (Paperback)

AT LAST!!!, a reliable reference BOOK. A self-taught VBA programmer, I know well the frustration of relying on Microsoft's 'help' for Visual Basic in Excel. Not knowing what to ask makes Microsoft's search engines just about useless, and the use of generic names for objects and variables in examples only adds to the confusion. Microsoft's 'on-line' manual lacks detail, adequate exemples, and is cumbersum when trying to review a previous sections.

Green's Excel 2000 VBA Programmers Reference has opened an entire new world for me as a programmer. Green approaches Excel 2000 VBA assuming the reader knows nothing. He presents one simple block of information at a time in a logical, building-block outline and avoids overwhelming the reader. His examples use actual code that when typed in, provide an instant result.

Green does a fair job in the daunting task of providing a quick reference to code through logical grouping, Table of Contents, Index, and page headings. However, to achieve the best results from Green's book, the reader must 'read' the book from start to finish otherwise, you'll be just as lost, maybe not as confused, as using Microsoft's on-line help. Green's organization is such that once finished, the reader will at least know which chapter to start looking for the right information.

I have been an avid supporter of Microsoft Office suites and firmly believe their potential goes largely untapped by businesses costing them thousands, if not millions of dollars in lost production and through the purchase of software which can be done by MS Office. Green's book allowed me to compose a script which translated data from an old database management system to a new system - a process which was quite complex in some areas. This self-help endeavor saved my company several thousand dollars in paying for the vendor to perform the work.

Just getting started, then get Green's book and invest in a few Post-It's to mark the really useful sections. You win, your company wins.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Programmer's reference for professionals, August 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Excel 2000 VBA Programmers Reference (Paperback)

As a professional VBA programmer, I found this book to be an excellent reference. Although I use Excel 97, many of the programming concepts are the same as for Excel 2000. Each chapter maps well onto real-world issues that are likely to come up in an intensive programming environment. A good example of this is the chapter on International issues: I have recently been involved in developing a system installed in several countries across Europe, where the users previously had to switch to UK settings in order for the system to work. The book is not intended as a 'learn to program' guide, a genre which is too heavily catered for already, rather as a programmer's reference laid out in such a way as to find solutions to real-world problems quickly.