Office 2003 Programming: Real World Applications [Paperback]

Ty Anderson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590591399 | ISBN-13: 978-1590591390 | Publication Date: December 16, 2004 | Edition: 1

With the release of Office 2003, Microsoft has enhanced the ability of VB developers to build applications within Word and Excel by utilizing Visual Tools for Office (VTO). Working with VTO, developers will have the full features of Visual Studio .Net at their finger tips.

Although VTO provides Visual Studio .Net functionality, not all Office 2003 applications fully support .Net. Furthermore, VBA continues to be the language integrated into the suite. Good or bad, this is just how it is. As a result, VBA will continue to be a major factor with any Office Platform development endeavor.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ty Anderson is a partner at Cogent Company in Dallas, Texas. He spends his time consulting and building software using Microsoft technologies. In addition to consulting, Ty is a Microsoft "Most Valuable Professional" and writes frequently about Microsoft products including Visual Studio Tools for Office, SharePoint, Office, and SQL Server, and his work has been published on MSDN, Devx.com, DevSource.com, Simple-Talk.com, and CIO.com. Those who know Ty best stand in awe and amazement of two things: 1) His incredible good looks and 2) his cynical and sarcastic (and sometimes offensive) behavior. Look for him at any tech conference as he will be wearing his yellow Oakland Athletics hat. Say hello, and as he might just offer to buy you pint. Ty presented sessions at 2009 Tech-Ed and was a speaker at the fall 2009 DevConnections conference. You can read his latest ramblings on all things technical at his blog: http://www.officedeveloper.net.

Product Details

• Paperback: 466 pages
• Publisher: A-Press; 1 edition (December 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590591399
• ISBN-13: 978-1590591390
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,895,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Compelling content - Flawed execution, February 26, 2005

By 

KKop (Atlanta, GA - USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Office 2003 Programming: Real World Applications (Paperback)

This was a book I had been looking for for a long time. The content will be a treasure trove of ideas for those interested in office programming.

However...
(This relates to chapter 7, the first chapter I jumped to)
The code as it is in the book will NEVER work. Even though no errata for the book are listed, the code in the book differs significantly from the code available for download from the apress site. So I changed my code to reflect that. This fixed some of the bugs, but others remained.

Not until I changed the code to call the correct database column names (which are mismatched in the book AND in the downloadable code) did the webservice work.

Who proofreads these books anyway? This doesn't exactly instill a lot of confidence in apress books. Not exactly $39.99 well spent.

A book I might still recommend to others, but only because it's the only book of its kind available right now.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book got me a promotion !, January 27, 2005

By 

Robert Draper "Design/Sales Engineer" (Oregon City, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Office 2003 Programming: Real World Applications (Paperback)

This is a must have book for anyone who uses MS Office tools.
It makes great use of Office 2003 its new .Net integrated features.

When the company I work for broke up into business units I suddenly was wearing many hats. With little experience in administation, I quickly began to seek out ways to streamline the process. Try to reduce things like double entrys, nagging action reports, and headaches from poor follow up on sales calls.
With that in mind I bought Ty Anderson's book.

This book was more advanced than my skill level when I bought it, but it's helped me to finally get a handle on vb.net. The book is chock full of meat and potatoes stuff that bases itself from software I do know, things like excel, word and some access.
Like the editorial review says, it has ready to go apps.
All you need is Office 2003pro and Visual Studio Tools for Office and your in business.

The author does a great job of breaking down the code in a very straight forward, no words wasted kind of way. And provides great apps which offer another way to reverse understand things.
I made use of the word doc generator and outlook to organise my client contact info and todo lists. It got me praise and recognition at my work, Now Im a the team leader!
A Great investment.

Ive bought a whole mess of books trying to filter out usefull stuff. This one is all about usefull applications for Office.
If your a novice like me ,it will get you excited about learning to be a developer. If your skill set is more advanced it will be even more usefull, as it provides the building blocks for an endless array of usefull applications.
Two thumbs way up..
I'd also recommend Inside Access 2003.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good use cases, January 30, 2005

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Office 2003 Programming: Real World Applications (Paperback)

The emphasis of the book is given by the subtitle - 'real world applications'. Anderson essentially provides 9 use cases of programming MS Office 2003; one per chapter and written in Visual Basic. These cases can be valuable to you on several levels.

Firstly, if you are new to Visual Basic, then the book gives extended examples to improve your understanding.

Secondly, and obviously, to see how you can program the various and myriad components of Office 2003, from the UI to accessing a database and using XML. Very nontrivial, as you might appreciate from the level of detail in the chapters.

Thirdly, it is to find that one of the chapters actually fills a current need, and so you can just copy its code, perhaps with only some simple changes. While the book certainly suggests you can do this, it may actually be rare in practice.