Customer Reviews

Excel Add-in Development in C/C++: Applications in Finance (The Wiley Finance Series)

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

 

 

This book is written for people who have the need to make Excel do things it doesn't really want to do, or do them faster, more cleanly, more flexibly. It presumes a reasonable grasp of basic software development concepts. A solid C and/or C++ foundation skill, a good working knowledge of Excel, and at least some experience with VBA is needed.

The basic applications given in the book center around financial modelling but this represents a rather small part of the book. The concepts and techniques described in most of the book are about working to enhance and extend Excell functionality. These techniques would be aplicable to quite a number of application areas even including real time data capture and analysis.

Building add-ins for Excel is an area that has not been covered very well in the literature. This book is a coherent explanation of the relevant technoloby, what steps to follow, what pitfalls to avoid, and a good reference guide.

The CD-ROM includes several thousand lines of example code, numerous workbooks, and a number of complete example projects.

This is the ONLY book that is written exclusively for the Excel C API. It is well written but the reader needs to have basic C knowledge first. Development of XLLs in C++ is a topic not well documented in litertaure except for the MSDN website which has an archived section on the Excel 97 SDK. In any case, the CD code that comes with the book helps a lot. For a quick start to build your own programs you may use some interface classes and headers from the CD.

Several quants purchase a separate software XLL+ for developing the Excel XLLs, but even the software is a series of headers and cpp files made easy. And when it comes to more complicated development like dialog or menus, the book is a useful reference.

It may be true that a lot, defintely not all, of the information can be found in various places on the internet, but the sources are all over the place, incomplete and often refer to older technologies. The book contains much more than just the bland facts from various sources. For a start, the fact that all of this information is in one reference is extremely valuable. (I bought hardcopy, which I much prefer for reference and reading). The book is full of practical help and notes so that you don't have to find out the hard way where the undocumented problems are. There are worked sections on name handling and multi-threading. There are well-presented discussions about memory management, data types and handling large data structures. I work in finance but still think that I would have found this book useful even if I was working in another industry where high-speed number crunching is important. I was able to write xll add-ins after a weekend when it would have taken perhaps months otherwise.

I bought this in e-book format (it costs twice as much for some reason) and I did not get any of the code that comes on the CD with the hardcover.
I had written a scathing review of this book after reading the first four chapters which is simply VC++ documentation. Chapters 5-9 are a little more helpful though parts of it are also available free. Yet, I don't believe there is enough new material in here.

In this book you get detailed examples of how to access and extend the functionality within Excel. It is clearly a hands on programmer's book. The languages in which you can do this are C and C++.

Microsoft has provided a rich API in these languages, with which you can get at many objects within the spreadsheet. Like a reference to the currently active cell. Or a list of all open Excel documents. Or finding the formula of a cell, returned as text. Or trapping various events, like a recalculation or a window selection or a keyboard action.

As the book's title suggests, many of the examples are taken from finance. Apropos, given that this is a spreadsheet we're looking at. But the methods given can be applied in any context that you need Excel for.

I have not even received the product yet. How am I to write a review!