Customer Reviews

Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft® Excel and VBA®

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Over the years, I've read a number of books on Excel programming. Each one seemed much like the previous one, generally talking about writing macros and creating data-entry forms. Professional Excel Development takes the concept quite a bit farther. Rather than giving you the same old tired lessons, this book goes into detail on exactly how to build professional level applications. It even explains how to make your Excel-based application look as though Excel had nothing to do with it. Suffice it to say, this ain't your daddy's Excel book.
The authors, Stephen Bullen, Rob Bovey, and John Green, show a level of sophistication well beyond the norm. They'd rather teach you the proper way to program instead of teaching you how to use Excel. In fact, the first thing they do is distinguish five different levels of usage: Excel users, Excel power users, VBA developers, Excel developers, and professional Excel developers. The book is written for the highest level, so expect a lot of depth. The entire structure of the book builds around a time-entry application that is developed from a simple spreadsheet to a full-blown, production quality program. A CD-ROM is also included with all of the source code and multiple examples that are scattered throughout the book.
Reading Professional Excel Development is not something to be taken lightly. The authors have done a fine job putting together a cohesive methodology for using Excel as an application development platform. I know of no other book that covers this platform in such depth. At times I found myself lost in the details, but I suspect a "professional Excel developer" (which I am not) would be delighted in the depth of description and copious examples provided.
Professional Excel Development is an extremely well-written book that covers the use of Excel to a depth few authors have dared to tread. The text gives you the tools to build applications that are much more than automated spreadsheets. Almost any program your imagination can devise can be created using the techniques given, which is a testimony to the power of Excel. Bash Microsoft if you want, but they do sometimes come up with a winner, and Professional Excel Development allows you to take full advantage of its capabilities. I highly recommend this book.

Even if this book was not as well-written and insightful as it is, there is simply no other VBA book that comes close, in content and quality, on building professional-grade Excel applications. If that is your field, you have a lot to lose by not getting it. (I've stalked several large bookstores here in New York City and Amazon, of course.)

THE BOOK:
This book is a goldmine of application-design wisdom for developers seeking to write professional, VBA applications that stand the test of time. Even for none-professionals, like myself, the book contains a plethora of VBA "best practices" that can be put to immediate use. The authors are clearly sharing with you years of personal, professional experience, and top-notch acumen.
Because I am not the most attentive reader, the first thing I find myself looking at is how well-written a book is (a quality which makes me a Walkenbach fan). I am impressed by how "thorough", "well put", and "to the point" most sentences in this book are - from the first to last word!

A FEW HIGHLIGHTS FOR ME:
> Imagine building almost bullet-proof applications. The user never sees an ugly VBA error message, and, if an error occurs, the developer usually knows very quickly what the cause is. I do this now...courtesy of the book's excellent chapter 12 on Error Handling and a thorough chapter on Debugging (Chapter 16).
> Chapter 17 - Optimizing VBA Performance (and a little digression on creative thinking) is a must read. This alone is worth the book price!
> Imagine a progress-bar display that you can easily "plug in" to any VBA program you write. Now you can...this book shows you how, in Chapter 11.
> Do you understand how to use API functions, and which ones are most useful for Excel. Read Chapter 9. I first found this chapter online (informit.com), which led me to this book, in the first place. Knowing API, will allow you to tap into the entire windows operating system from VBA.
> Do you really understand classes...do you understand Interfaces and how you can put them to use in VBA?
Chapter 7 on Classes is worth a solid read. (Even if you've read chapter 5 & 6, in Ken Getz's VBA Developer's handbook). Chapter 11, demonstrates the usefulness of Interfaces, with two great examples (Sorting and Progress-Display).
> What if you wish to write code in .Net, C, (or VB6) yet still work with EXCEL or connect with your VBA code? This book shines on this topic with three chapters (20 - 22). I have not yet seen a discussion as thorough in another VBA book. (If I've missed one, please add me to your Amazon buddy list and email me. Thanks.)
> If you are not a database expert but want a good overview of using Excel to work with Databases, I suggest your read Chapter 13.
> How do "you" currently go about building your Application's Menubars and ToolBars? Most books recommend a table-driven system of some sort or another, which is what I was using, and, indeed, this book does, too...but wait until you see the authors' version in Chapter 8. In fact, I made the painful decision to give up my habit of doing things after spending time with this chapter, and the authors' wisdom is paying off!
As a reviewer from California put it, "Finally, The sequel to Walkenbach for developers is here!", and another from New Delhi, "Every line that I have read so far has a meaning. The book is written in a simple fluent language and brings out the point very clearly. It will take me to the next level of programming."
I could not agree more!

ACCESSORIES:
As you would expect, all code examples for the book (and more) are found on an accompanying CD. The excellent commenting of code, aids learning.
I do have one peeve: The book is not available in searchable PDF format. To be fair to the authors...if they did...your grandmother would probably have it by now ;-) (For a fee you can download chapters in html from http://safari.oreilly.com/)
I also use two, must-have, VBA Add-Ins produced by Stephen Bullen and Rob Bovey respectively, free of charge from their respective websites.
Stephen Bullen's Auto-Indenter: with a simple "right click", your VBA code is automatically indented at all the right places (with options to suit your personal preferences). Think of how much time you spend tabbing and moving lines about!
Rob Bovey's code-cleaner: which cleans up your VBA file and shrinks its size significantly. (It also gets rid of a mysterious VBA error, the name of which escapes me now).

If you cherished the Walkenbach's book for years and were longing for the advanced part to follow some day, you are there. So what if it is by different author.

Once I got the book and browsed through for couple of hours I already was eager to share my excitement. But... decided to do some more reading to make sure that the quality holds throughout the book. And I am still impressed immensely. This is an outstanding book

Buy the book even just for Chapter 20. Combining Excel and Visual Basic 6.

The rumors about the death of VB6 are highly exaggerated. Even if you believe otherwise, the techniques described for using VB forms in VBA will give you a good grasp how to achieve the same thing with other languages.

Basically, if you are a developer and were looking for a book to let you outgrow the limitations of VBA, this is THE BOOK.

If you are a power user and would like to stay in confines of Excel and VBA, then most probably Walkenbach's book will be sufficient, although reading this book will give you an incentive to do more.

The book is targeting power users and professional developers and if You consider Yourself to be in this group then this book is for you.

It's a well written book, with a high technical level and with a good structure.

But as with every book it has its strong parts as well as weak parts. Weak parts in terms of that some chapters are overviews only and do not give any depth on the subjects they cover.

The chapters that cover best practice are all excellent. Here the authors share all their experience & knowledge by discussion application structures, structure for notation, advanced techniques for userforms and toolbars, error handling, debugging and many other things. The chapters also cover well how to create and use add-ins and so called user defined functions (UDFs).

The chapters that deal with VB 6.0 & Excel are all excellent too. A welcome contribution is that this book leverages many of the good techniques we use in MS VB 6.0 into Excel, especially when it comes to userforms.

The book covers in a nice way how to create & use classes, create & use ActiveX DLL and front-loaders for Excel in MS VB 6.0.

A whole chapter is devoted to Visual Tools for Office System (VSTO) but point also out all the present shortcomings of VSTO.

As with every book nowadays this book also includes a chapter about XML which is well written and with a high technically level. However the chapter is rather short which tend to compress the content.

If the above is what You're looking for then this book is a must have.

The following chapters provide overviews of the subjects:
Worksheet Design
Programming with Database
Data Manipulation techniques
Windows API
Creating XLLs with C#

If You're looking to get more then an introduction or compressed picture on these subject then there exist other books that will give You more.

The book uses an example, PETRAS Timesheet, to exemplify the subject that is covered in each chapter. Some readers will appreciate it very much while other (like me) will skip it. Anyway, PETRAS timesheet is also well worked out like the rest of the book.

In order to work through both the PETRAS Timesheet case and all the examples the book is given You need to have access to the following softwares:

MS Office 2003 Professional (minimum requirement for the VSTO-chapter)
MS Visual Basic 6.0 (no longer available for sale from Microsoft)
Visual Studio.NET (C#)
VSTO (Separate tool that require Visual Studio.NET)

Kind regards,

Dennis Wallentin aka XL-Dennis

I've been working with Excel for years...

This is by far the BEST EXCEL DEVELOPMENT BOOK I've ever seen. It paid for itself many, many times over in the theory, and code tricks I've learned from it.

BEWARE BEGINNERS....if you're unfamiliar with Excel or VBA development, this isn't the book for you...start with Excel 2003 Power Programming by John Walkenbach.

If you're looking to take your spreadsheets to the next level, BUY THIS BOOK...IT RULES

The typical Excel programming book is often like a VBA cookbook. Just a succesion of VBA code snippets and at the end the reader has a nice collection of VBA recipes, but doesn't really know how to cook. This book will show the reader how to cook.

From chapter to chapter the authors incrementally develop an Excel-based application. As they do this they skillfully introduce and interweave a number of development topics. Some topics are specific to Excel such as user forms, others are general like error handling. Each topic is discussed in isolation as well as it how interacts with the other aspects of the development process.

After just a few chapters I had a much better sense not only of the capabilities of the Excel programming environment but also how you can make it all fit together to achieve a highly functional and maintainable application. Highly recommended.

When picking up this book, I was an advanced Excel user. Having discovered most of its features by trial-and-error, and coming from a fairly solid programming background, I understood well the interaction between the underlying object model and the sheets appearing on the screen to end users. I have also crafted many sophisticated worksheet formulas, and explored just about every suggestion of literature such as "Excel Hacks" and "Advanced Excel Report Development".

Professional Excel Development offers ideas and tools necessary for designing full-fledged, robust Excel-based applications. It does not spend time explaining how various features work, but rather goes into detail on how to put these features to best use.

Here is what I picked up from this book, together with the authors' Excel 2003 VBA reference:
* ways to leverage Excel's built-in features to avoid excessive coding
* advanced design techniques for using Excel as a WYSIWYG interface designer
* techniques for creating custom menu bars and programming their behavior
* various means of interacting with the user and simplifying their sessions by providing guidance as to which steps need to be taken
* restricting the Excel environment to take on the appearance of a product condusive of the goal stated in previous bullet
* using VBA in conjunction with the Excel object model to create powerful object-oriented structures for spreadsheet-based applications
* programming Excel-based solutions in an executable to provide a more standalone application
* using Windows API calls to increase robustness of the application

One key feature of this book is its consistent approach. The authors maintain a consistent structure, using the same application throughout the book for their "practical example" to demonstrate new features made available through the material in each chapter. Also, the "best practices" approach provides a level of consistency that is generally desired of anywhat sophisticated applications. Useable modules are provided on the accompanying CD, ready to be used in readers' own applications.

In the beginning, the authors explain the audiences for which this book may or may not be intended. They separate these into users, power users, VBA developers, Excel developers, and professional developers. The latter three categories of users will benefit the most from this book, each in his/her own way. VBA developers will learn how to use built-in features (I think this is where I started); Excel developers will learn how to incorporate Excel-based solutions into larger applications; Professional developers will be exposed to a great variety of "best practices", optimization techniques, and various other means for developing consistency in Excel applications.

If you do not fall into the latter three categories, you might not pick up much from this book. It is not useless to you, however; you can still find many worksheet/userform design techniques, and get an introduction to the kind of power VBA-based programming can offer. Nonetheless, you may be well-advised to start off with something simpler, such as John Walkenbach's Excel Power Programming (as alluded to by the authors of this book), simply because the present book assumes a good degree of knowledge and leaves much for the reader to figure out from the fully-functional examples provided - thereby covering the ground that it does.

Overall, this book makes for a wonderful reference to the various under-the-hood features of Excel. Even if you've already encountered many of the techniques described, and could technically discover them further on your own, it is useful to have them readily available in a single collection. Very few items are left out; application design, object-oriented programming techniques, database applications, debugging techniques, Office automation, and external interop are all covered here. Professional Excel Development is a solid reference to be consulted for years to come.

I've been using Excel since version 4 and only started programming with VBA just over a year ago. I started with books by John Walkenbach, followed by more than a dozen other books, ..whatever I could find. I learned more reading this one book than I did reading several other books because this book really hits the target with its topics, and it's rich content. From start to finish, this book lays out the application development process in a step-by-step, matter of fact fashion. The authors have shared their unquestionable knowledge and skills in this no-nonsense approach to developing a sample application, exposing many well explained examples of what I would call 'absolutely brilliant concepts'. Although there is no 'handholding' style used in this book, they have done an incredible job of making sense of some pretty complex subject matter.

Since I am a machinist by profession, and familiar with machine code, I didn't have any problem learning VBA because it was similar to what I already knew. What I did have a problem with was the myriad of rules, methods, properties, objects, collections, functions, and operators. The books I had found so far were very helpful in understanding all these things, but they didn't give me what I was looking for as a standard for application development. This book takes that to a whole other level, ..it really sets the standard for Visual Basic for Applications programming, period!

Before reading this book, I read Excel 2002 VBA Programmer's Reference, also by these same authors. It caters more to beginner and intermediate level programmers, but it started me along the path I was looking to take my programming and application development. Applying the things I learned from this book has enabled me to turn my amateur VBA projects into professional quality applications. This book solidified my decision to follow these authors and their work because they are clearly the greatest Excel/VBA minds on the planet. I urge anyone reading this review to buy this book because you just won't find the kind of information found in this book anywhere. This book is a must have for your desktop library. I can't wait to see what these authors are working on next!

A disclosure: I know the authors professionally and consider them if not friends then at least professional colleagues. That said...

This is a must have book for not only the advanced and professional developer but also the advanced beginner or intermediate developer who wants to know what s/he should aspire to. The authors discuss a wide range of very useful development techniques that one can leverage to build 'industrial strength' solutions using not only MS Excel but also other Office products.

As the authors themselves indicate, the book has a lot to offer the experienced developer. Not many books on this subject can make me go, "Umm...that's interesting." This did. Several times. The breadth and depth of their expertise is apparent throughout the book as they discuss topics ranging from worksheet design to user interface design to charting to debugging techniques to the use of 'external' programming languages.

Even those who may disagree with some of the recommendations about 'best practices' will find most disagreements to be of style and degree rather than substance.

Advanced beginners or intermediate level developers serious about improving their skills will also benefit from this book since many chapters recommend 'best practices' - general rules, design of worksheets, command bars, and user forms, error handling, etc.

As another reviewer noted some of the chapters come across as an overview to more niche development environments. The authors do a very good job of building bridges between Excel and those advanced technologies - examples being XLLs and COM Add-ins. While fully understandable why they cannot address all those technologies in detail, it does leave the reader interested in those niches hungry for more.

Two quibbles: First, I was disappointed that the authors did not address worksheet range selections in a user form. Given the otherwise thorough nature of the book, this was a startling oversight of an important topic.

Second, some of the chapters contain material that the advanced developer ought to know - ironically making the book more valuable to the advanced beginner or intermediate developer. For example, the chapters on data manipulation, charting, and VBA debugging made me go, "Huh? Why is this here?" While very good in its own right, such material seemed out of place in a book of this caliber.

Overall, anyone who develops or wants to develop software for 'heavy duty' and practical use in the MS Excel and Office environment should have this not just on their bookshelf but within easy reach.

I have got this book. The comment on cover page says "it is for the serious developer who is creating advanced applications". Well... I say it is a must read for any VBA programmer who wants to write good quality code. Every line that I have read so far has a meaning. The book is written in a simple fluent language and brings out the point very clearly. It will take me to the next level of programming.

I AM SURE ABOUT IT.

A BEAUTIFUL CREATION.