Customer Reviews

Microsoft Excel 97 Developers Kit: With CDROM; Extend and Customize Microsoft Excel Using C and the Microsoft Excel API

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

 

 

I was navigating on MSDN Library searching for BIFF file formats description, but I found nothing. This probably is the only solution I have. Micro$oft always have a way to take our money.

I was really disappointed when I started reading this book. I expected good and detailed examples of dll function linking and especially hard core computations which cannot be performed effectively using VB. What I found was a messy collection of elementary examples worked out very incompletely. Also I expected not to see many XLM examples, but the book was full of those. The good thing for a high level developer is a complete chapter of excel file formats, not much use for me though. Not recommended to users or smaller scale developers:

This book covers many topics at a fairly superficial level. The C API section is very incomplete compared to the Word Developer's kit book. There is no index.

This book is shockingly incomplete. I could not find any details on FP even though the book mentions it as an argument and leaves it up to the reader to figure out how Excel uses it. Also, the examples are so elementary it is sickening. For example, when the book explains SAFEARRAY the example given is for a one dimensional array. BIG DEAL. The real challenge is dealing with multi-dimensional arrays. I was surprised by the lack of detail in this book especially coming from Microsoft Press.

This isn't really so much a review of the writing style of the book. I don't even care about VB or VC++ or anything of the such. All I care about is how to read BIFF8 files w/o Microsoft's libraries (meaning by hand).

The book does not cover OLE 2 Compound Document format (which is to my knowledge completely undocumented -- well not anymore after my project), but does cover the record structures within the BIFF 8 file format (excel 97 file format). You need both to actually read the file, so thats a star off. If this were a book on learning a language it's more like a dictionary. It doesn't cover the grammar of the language at all (the second star). Its only the words. Meaning it tells you what the record types are but not where they should be. It does come with the BIFFVIEW util to view the structures withing a biff file (xls file) and the book says you should start there. All in all, I'd like a bit more complete reference, but this is all there is. And in fact its out of print so you'll have to buy it used.
If you need to read and write excel files from scratch you'll need this book and either laola (a perl script and docs that cover ole 2 albeit incompletely) or our project "poi" (of which the hssf module is also is a better biff viewer), laola should be easy to find via CPAN and POI is hosted on sourceforge. You'll still need this book, but those projects give you the rest of what you need.

Excel has a lot of programming power in it now with the addition of VBA 5.0. But you still can't do everything! This book is good for only those people who want to go on beyond the VBA. Especially handy and interesting was the full detail of the actual structure of an XLS file. A must have for serious Excel developers