Customer Reviews

Learning Word Programming: Creating Word Macros and Beyond

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

 

 

Steve Roman clearly explains the most important of the Word objects, with useful real-world examples thrown in. I had spent several weeks programming Word VBA on my own before getting this book, and wish I'd had Chapter 14-"The Range and Selection Objects" when I started! (As it was, I spent hours looping through the VBA help files trying to figure out how to get the range object to do what I wanted...aaaaargh!)

It's true, the book spends nine chapters on intro programming skills and the VB editor, to the detriment of more examples. Beginners will rejoice, while intermediates will wish the book went into more detail and had more of Steve's concise code snippets. Even so, the book has many "been there" tips and pointers that are worth the price of admission.

Let me start by saying I am not a Visual Basic programmer, until now! I had a project that needed a solution. My research lead me to Visual Basic for Application's Word Object Model. Not having any significant experience in VBA I needed a way to get up to speed quickly. I first bought the Guy-Davis book Word97 VBA and found it simplistic and not providing enough technical information to accomplish my task. I then purchased the Word 2000 Programmers Reference Handbook which told me everything I ever wanted to know about the Word Object Model, however, it didn't really explain how and when to use the enumerators and other such objects, which are very important when programming. I work with 5 different languages and felt very lost with this book.

Then I purchased Steven Roman's book "Learning Word Programming". Spent a weekend reading it and by Monday I was more than ready to tackle my project. After reading his book using the Word 2000 Programmers Reference became my next best friend because Mr. Roman's clear and concise approach to explaing everything (sans fluff, as he says other authors have a tendency to do) helped even a seasoned programmer, such as myself.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to become a programmer or is now a programmer. Yes, it was boring to read the 'Programming 101' end of it but after getting through all of it I was pleasantly surprised at how a little refresher helped me look at my project from a new perspective.

Again, get the book! It saved me hours of work.

Dan Borden danielborden@hotmail.com

This is a good book for learning Word Programming, but if you want a reference book, look elsewhere. It is well written and informative, but does not have enough detail for reference use.

As mentioned in another review, I thought the book lacked enough useful exercises to practice Word programming. I bought this book because I couldn't find any others at the time specifically addressing Word programming and in the end, I had to search for another book to supplment it. I found it much more useful as a reference than as a learning tool.

This book has saved me. It is the best book I have found for someone learning to write VBA programs for Word. It explains things very clearly and concisely, with short examples.

From my experience, one book seldom is enough to learn programming. If you are a beginning-to-intermediate VBA programmer, get this book. Also get the Word 97 Macro and VBA Handbook by Guy Hart-Davis. It is aimed a little more at the beginning level, and takes more time to explain the basics. If you are an experienced programmer, try VB&VBA in a Nutshell: The Language from O'Reilly press for a good reference book (this book is beyond my level, but it is well-recommended on this Amazon site). Another useful book is Word 97 Annoyances by O'Reilly press.

I wish this book had been longer, but I think to do that the author would have needed to add more about Visual Basic in general, and there are already a lot of other books on that subject. A good beginning book on general VB is Beginning Visual Basic by Peter Wright.

I bought this book based on the reviews below, I'm a beginner in the VBA world (first book) and I liked how the author writes and explain the theory about VBA BUT unfortunately he barely have any exercise that would demonstrate what he is talking about on the chapter that just ended (only in the end of the book he gives some exercises "THE FAX example". Programming for me (a true beginner that came from the Network world) is like Math, you can show all the math theories that you want but if you don't give some exercises to demonstrate your theories it gets hard for US BEGINNERS to "see" the practicality of the theory just explained. I agree that he does not have to waist 500 more pages writing exercises, but if he could include 1 or 2 exercise for each topic that he explained It would be great for us real beginners in the VBA world to understand. For me that is the difference between beginner and experience programmers, when you have experience just having the theory can be sufficient and a reference book will do the work. You can understand the key concepts, mainly because you have PAST experiences to back it up... If you want a good theory book to show you the key concepts this is it, BUT if you also want to have a Hands On understanding of how VB editor works with the VBA world and how to apply the main VBA codes, well for now you will need another book.

What a useful and needed book! Steven Roman has delivered a concise, on-target introduction to the theory and practice of programming in Microsoft Word's VBA. The book offers a two-chapter introduction to good programming practices and the IDE, (mostly useful for beginners, though I picked up a couple of helpful IDE hints). Four chapters address the constructs and syntax of Word VBA, covering in about 60 pages what many intro books waste entire trees to convey. But the heart of the book is the nine-chapter introduction to Word's Object Model, which mixes reference-like descriptions of objects, properties, and methods with implementation details that are hard to find in the help documents, and also throws in some useful, Word-specific practical programming advice. I particularly liked the minimalist 'sample code' snippets -- they let me focus on the point being illustrated without forcing me to wade through elaborate wrappings -- but some readers might prefer more examples, or prefer the 'sample application' approach.

While the book is targeted at 'beginning programmers', there is an important caveat: the conciseness of the text and the simplicity of the examples may not encourage beginners to visualize all of the possibilities inherent in the Object Model and WordVBA. If you know what you want to do in Word, but don't know how to do it, this book is going to be extremely helpful. If you don't know what you want to do -- if you are looking for ideas for real-world Word applications -- look elsewhere first, then get this book to help you make them real.

this book is exactly the same as a book by Steven Roman titled "Word Macros" ISBN 1-56592-524-6. It is word for word and page for page the same. I purchased both books and got cheated.

There are only two specific commercial books available on programming in Word 97, and this one is the best.

For those who don't know the VBA development environment, there are a couple of chapters to get you up to speed (or to provide reminders to those who've been away for awhile).

For those who don't know the basic VB language, four chapters summarize the core of the language (obviously, only the main statements are covered). However, since many of the examples are stated in terms of VBA, instead of plain VB, these chapters are still useful.

Then in chapter 9, the real book gets underway.

Chapter 9: Object Models

Chapter 10: The Word Object Model

Chapter 11: The Application Object

Chapter 12: The Document Object

Chapter 13: The Section and HeaderFooter Objects

Chapter 14: The Range and Selection Objects

Chapter 15: The Find and Replace Objects

Chapter 16: The Table Object

Chapter 17: The List Object

Chapter 18: Shortcut Key Bindings

Chapter 19: Built-in Dialog Opetions

Chapter 20: Custom Dialog Boxes

Chapter 21: Menus and Toolbars.

The coverage by object, especially to someone who doesn't know the object model, is invaluable. Even if you already know the model, since most of what gets done in Word gets done via an object, finding out how to do something with this book is easy. I opened the book up to chapter 14 and started reading, and immediately learned what the Range and Selection objects were and what they were for.

Most books treat the objects and the object model as an aside, something that just happens to be there (and oh, gee, I hope you understand how they all fit together and what they do). Not so with this book. The objects of the model and what to do with them are at the core of the book.

What can I say, I found this book very informative. Also, check out his second book.

The writing is clear and concise. This book isn't going to *make* you a Word programmer, but it can be a useful reference.

It seems Word programming is all about creativity. Obviously, creativity is something that can't be taught.