Microsoft Office Programming: A Guide for Experienced Developers [Paperback]

Rod Stephens (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590591216 | ISBN-13: 978-1590591215 | Publication Date: October 22, 2003 | Edition: 1

By using the same back-end macro programming language, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Microsoft Office applications allow users to easily transfer their VBA programming skills from one Office product to another. A developer who is skilled at using VBA to program Access can quickly learn to program Word or Excel. Better still, VBA is a fairly complete subset of Visual Basic (VB). That means a Visual Basic developer already knows how to use VBA and a VBA programmer knows a lot about Visual Basic. In addition to this large body of shared information, learning to program Office applications requires that the developer understand each application's specific features. For example, to write VBA code for Microsoft Word, the developer must understand Word's capabilities and how to make Word do useful things. Unfortunately most VB and VBA books assume the reader is learning to program from scratch. They ignore the large amount of VBA programming information that is shared by the applications and they teach all of the details starting with the basics. A programmer who wants to learn how to program several Office applications must buy separate books for each application with a huge amount of overlap. Microsoft Office Programming: A Guide for Experienced Developers covers only the material not shared by all of the Office applications. It focuses on the more advanced techniques that start where the other books' VBA tutorials end. It explains how to link the applications together using OLE, how to manipulate each application with VBA code, and how to make the applications work together by controlling each other.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

In a previous incarnation, Rod Stephens was a mathematician. During his stint at MIT, he discovered the joys of algorithms and graphics, and has been programming professionally ever since. During his career, he has worked on an eclectic assortment of applications spanning such topics as repair dispatch, telephone switch programming, tax processing, and training for professional football players. Rod has written more than a dozen books that have been translated into half a dozen different languages, and more than 200 magazine articles covering Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications, Delphi, and Java. He is a columnist for Hardcore Visual Basic. Rod's popular website, VB Helper (http://www.vb-helper.com) receives several million hits per month and contains more than a thousand pages of tips, tricks, and example code for Visual Basic programmers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 736 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (October 22, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590591216
• ISBN-13: 978-1590591215
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,667,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you're not an Idiot or a Dummy, July 25, 2004

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W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Microsoft Office Programming: A Guide for Experienced Developers (Paperback)

Microsoft has done an excellent job of integrating its Office suite of products. So if you are familiar with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), you can use it to programmatically perform tasks within each Office product, like Excel, Word or Powerpoint. Or, within one of these products, you can write an application that can invoke an instance of another program.

Within one book, Stephens shows an efficient and unified way to learn how to do all this, and more. The trick is to be able to use VBA as a macro programming language. This is the key to understanding and using MS Office as a coherent entity. Ultimately, Stephens suggests that it is quicker than learning how to program each product on a case-by-case basis.

Stephens cheerfully dumps on other texts that call you an idiot or dummy. (If you know what I mean.) He unabashedly expects you to be conversant in VB or VBA. To be specific, he doesn't waste time going over the elementary syntactical points of VBA. So you don't have to thumb through these pages in idle frustration. He drags you rapidly into non-trivial coding explanations of how to use VBA to get at MS Office.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mix and match MS Office, November 9, 2006

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A. Quintero (PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Microsoft Office Programming: A Guide for Experienced Developers (Paperback)

This book is the book you need to get you going when you want to use two or more office applications in your own home brewed apps. This book doesn't drag you through learning the basics of VBA but,takes you straight to the meat and potatoes of office development. Shows you the differences in the object models and ways you can use those differences.

It helped me restructure a few access applications to add value and greater functionality to them in my organization. I learned how I could use Excel as a report writer using preformated workbooks and the same with Word. If you want to know more about meshing office apps together without reading through material you already know then this is the book you need.