Customer Reviews

Office XP Development with VBA

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I was very disappointed in this publication. As a neophyte to VBA, I was looking for a presentation that is easy to understand, with many "hands-on" programming examples. This book does neither. The author says that the book is for beginners, but I found myself quickly lost; this book is clearly geared toward those having an intermediate level of VBA prowess, or at least some familiarity with VBA. Also, in one of the very few step-by-step programming examples Mr. Aitken does include (a program sending an e-mail to every contact listed in an Outlook address book), there were typographical errors in his code that set off my debugger!

If your looking for a VBA book that has easy-to-follow examples, save your money and buy something else. This one's a "dog with fleas" for a rookie like me.

I'm a VBA programmer working in Office 2002/XP, and this book and Steve Roman's "Writing Word Macros" are my main references. The book (Aitken's "Office XP Development") has a useful 12 page chapter on Powerpoint VBA, (very handy, since there are NO books on Powerpoint VBA development available, and very little info on the web), and also has an introduction to the Windows API (which saved my life).

Since the book covers all six Office apps, and then some, it naturally can't provide the level of detail of a single application book, but I think it's a useful addition to a VBA programmers bookshelf.

It's very readable, and explains some tricky concepts well. On the whole, I think it's a great alternative to buying six separate books to cover the Office suite.

I bought this book (along with the Microsoft Office Xp Developer's Guide by MS Press) hoping to learn about Office Xp development. What a disappointment! Fully one-third of this book (chapters 12-21) covers very elementary VBA syntax like datatypes, loops, writing procedures, error handling etc. Lord knows there are more than enough books with those topics. This VBA material should have been put on a CD or a website to download for free.

I was looking for a book that assumes VBA knowledge and uses that as a starting point to thoroughly cover Office Xp development. My area of interest, Word development, occupies just 1 chapter consisting of 30 pages. To be a little fair, some of preliminary chapters were useful for setting the scene. Looks like I'm going to have to piece things together from the MSDN website along with web searches and the MS support/KB articles - AGAIN.

Other books that sound like they could be good for Word development: 1. Word 2000 Developer's Handbook by Guy Hart-Davis; 2. Learn Word 2000 VBA Document Automation by Scott Driza; 3. Writing Word Macros by Steven Roman. update to this review: I've used book 3 and it is quite good.