Customer Reviews

Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming: Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators

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

 

 

As a relative novice to outlook programming, this book took me through all the steps in a clear an concise way. I've bought several books on the subject before, but somehow one or more important issues were always left out. Not in this book.
If you want to automate the way you work with Outlook without having to find out everything yourself buy this book. Sue Mosher's website is great too, by the way, and offers a treasure chest of tip, code and a very good forum.

I needed to parse tables in a received Outlook email (HTML code), get information from an Excel spreadsheet based on what I found in the received Outlook email, and use what I found to create a new Outlook email to be sent to someone else. "Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming" helped me with about 50-60% of what I needed to do. I had to use Visual Basic and the Visual Basic parts of "Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming" helped steer me in the right direction.

Using Visual Basic with the Microsoft Suite of Programs appears to be a black art. Either you know it or you don't. "Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming" outlines how to do a number of very specific things. If that is what you need to do, then you will be OK. Once you try to do something other than what is shown in the book, you will pretty much be on your own.

As the title says, this book is not for newbies. It covered a lot of different topics. It was hit or miss on the specific application I was writing, but no book will ever hit that 100%.

The only issue I have is the toggling back and forth between VBA and the less content rich VBScript. The two systems are so close to each other, it sometimes was confusing which code block I was reading.

Suggestion, for VBA examples, use the color coding that comes with the VBA editor.

The Outlook VBA programmable attributes are very poorly designed and executed, with minimal support from Microsoft. Ms. Mosher's books make the product at least minimally useful. They are well written and cover most of the topics needed by an intermediate to advanced VA programmer. They do suffer from the ills of most books that attempt to make Microsoft products usable in that the topic approach is linear. Examples, as in Microsoft's Help files tend to be of the simple, direct type. I like texts that are a richer mix of reference and "how to". Ms. Mosher is at her best when she moves off the beaten path and covers information needed for more complex tasks.

I will admit, I did not think of utilizing VBA within MS Outlook. I have been using MS Excel for years and use VBA regularly. I have used VBA within MS Excel to send emails so I had a basic knowledge of using VBA for email.
With this book I was able to really open my mind and figured out what I have been missing. I have been using MS Outlook for over 10 yrs and I wish I would have found a resource like this years ago.
I got this book to help me in a project where I was asked to evaluate how our sales reps were using MS Outlook and if we could do anything to improve how we use the program. With this I was able to write some VBA to get creative and automate some features to help reduce the amount of time our sales reps use on email along with add utilization of the other functions within MS Outlook.
This is a must have addition for any MS Office resource library in your office or home.

The book is full of good information. I have already experience in the subject and I like it very much. Very good.

I have yet to go through the whole book. What I have gone through, I am already applying to a project I am developing.