Customer Reviews

Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft Excel, VBA, and .NET (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Every once in a while a technical book comes along which strikes the perfect balance between "technical detail", "practical application", and "vision". I am, like many people who buy self-help style technical books (as opposed to full out college textbooks), a self declared power-user. Power users are folks who need to get stuff down; not much time for parsing minute details and theoretical concepts. We look for ways to make our day-to-day business tasks more automated. If you're self employed like me, you're very business existence depends on automation.

This book is special for 3 reasons:

1) Practicality of advanced topics:
As a power-user, when was the last time you found yourself seriously looking at c programming, ADO, and SQL? The authors give us real life uses for these sorts of things, in a very focused manner. You walk away with an excellent understanding of why and when to use these things (notice I didn't say thorough understanding. The authors wisely admit that's someone else job, and point you in the right direction), based on what you're trying to accomplish.

2) Relevance of good programming practices:
Most books on programming teach "good programming practice" as if you are going to be working in an enterprise environment, with a team of engineers and professors. That's fine but in reality power-users work under deadlines and completely alone. No one cares how well you comment your code. As long as the thing works, when you want it too, then you've programmed enough. The authors explain a concept called "Interfacing" in a way that makes "good programming" a very practical time investment. I know "Interfacing" is not a new concept (as none of the topics in this book are). Its all in how the authors connect the dots. The relationship of concepts is far more important than the concept itself.

3) You want to know more:
Usually that's a bad thing, but not in this case because you know why. 90% of technical authors write some form of a dictionary, sprinkled with examples. But the end goal of a program is automation (or at least it should be), whether its iTunes or VBA. Take a repetitious task and automate it. Power-users don't have the luxury of slogging through a dictionary. If I spend time learning an advanced technical topic, there must be clear, reasonably obtainable objectives. The authors accomplish this by a lot. This is a tech book that really sheds light on the usefulness of all those seemingly unuseful-to-you type topics that have spawned so many 1300 page books.

If you've hung with me this far, you might have noticed I don't talk about Excel. That's because this book really isn't about Excel. Excel acts mostly as a cloths-line, linking various topics, methods, and recommendations. The authors tell us at the beginning, Excel is an excellent platform for fast application development and prototyping. THAT's really what the book is about.

It's too bad books aren't written this way more often. Hope this review was helpful

I teach Excel and am a VBA developer. I laughed as I read chapter 3, titled "General Application Development Best Practices", because I found myself thinking, wow, if I had read this book 15 years ago I could have saved myself tons of grief! It is one of the BEST summaries of "good vba practices" that I've ever seen. For beginning developers, reading chapter 3 alone is worth the cost of the book. After developing for 15 years, I follow almost all of the practices that were covered in that chapter - and can't agree more with the importance of them. I haven't finished going through this book yet but my enthusiasm for the book wouldn't be diminished even if I hated the rest of it.

This is the perfect book for those of us who are self-taught VBA developers. This book is especially appropriate for beginning VBA developers. I learned so much from this book that will help me do my job better by writing more solid applications.

I cannot recommend this book enough for anyone who plans on writing Excel applications that need to have a truly professional advantage.

Four top Microsoft Excel developers offer guidance for building secure applications using Excel in the second updated edition of PROFESSIONAL EXCEL DEVELOPMENT, making for a top pick for any Excel library catering to intermediate and advanced Excel programmers. From designing better worksheets and using both built-in and add-on options to using the new Ribbon interface and utilizing XML within Excel, this packs in integrated solutions and is a top pick for any computer collection catering to either business managers or Excel programmers.

One of the 4 star reviews mentions that this book only 'overviews' some topics. I thought it's appropriate to mention the reason why this book was written (I read this on Stephen Bullen's website). The Wrox book by Bullen, Green, Bovey has always been the master of advanced VBA, has been since Excel 2000. They did a Excel 2002 edition. But the re-write for Excel 2003 was done without their approval by someone else and was full of bad mistakes. This book came out from the authors under a different publisher, and to me it's the real revision of the Wrox book for Excel 2003, but also it takes Excel development to another level. Hence, it is best treated as an extension to the Wrox book, which incidentally the authors have now regained in the Excel 2007 revision. Buy both.

This book is the next step in Excel Development. If you have read the beginner books and are ready to go into more deeper water, then give this book a try. You will not be disappointed.

If you've read pretty much every book on VBA Excel development and are looking for the next step, this book could be what you're looking for.

It covers topics which I haven't seen dealt with properly elsewhere, such as how to get into .NET development for Excel (and why that more or may not be a good idea for your app, and where you'd want to use VBA or VB6 instead).

The chapters on writing a "dictator app" are my favourites. They explain how a developer can completely take over the Excel interface, rewriting ribbons, changing the activity of key presses (like ctrl-C) and replacing them with whatever you like, and other things, resulting in an app which can look like it isn't even Excel.

This wouldn't be the first Excel development book to start with if you are new, but if you are after some of the more advanced and hard to find information about the subject, this has plenty.

A simple browse of the TOC will show you where this book is heading... A Professional Excel Developer.
Not for the absolute beginner. Intermediates and Advanced Excel'ers will benefit greatly.

The back of this book says that it is "Fully updated for Excel 2007". However, I have been disappointed to find that's not true.

First, the section on Excel "dictator" apps does not go into the requirements for Excel 2007, except to mention that you'll need to look at the chapter on the ribbon. But that isn't why I'm writing this review.

I wanted to position a form next to a worksheet cell, and on pages 400-402, they say that trying to do that using the cell's Top and Left properties is "extremely difficult", and then say that "Fortunately, there is an easier workaround, which is to use the window that Excel uses for editing embedded charts."

Their workaround code uses Windows APIs. That's no problem, but it's interesting that with a solution apparently available that would probably work on both Windows and Mac (using the cell's Top and Left properties), they show only an easier solution that works only for Windows. No mention of Mac there.

Anyway, I typed in their code, and it didn't work. I carefully checked every character and didn't see any differences. On a hunch, I closed the workbook and opened it in Excel 2003. This time it worked correctly.

I had originally tried it in Excel 2010 (32-bit), and this book was published in 2009, so I tried it in Excel 2007. It still didn't work.

So I started Spy++, hoping that the special window was just renamed in Excel 2007/2010 and/or in a different place in the window hierarchy, which would be easy to work around. No such luck. Using Spy++, I found the special window in Excel 2003, and then looked for it in Excel 2007. The special window they use is not created in Excel 2007 anywhere in the window hierarchy, and in fact no additional window is created at all by those steps.

So this easier solution works only for Excel 2003 for Windows and earlier. The book was published in 2009. Where's the "extremely difficult" solution that works in Excel 2007? You won't find it in this 2009 book, nor any mention of the fact that this "easier" solution does not work in Excel 2007.

I guess I'll have to look elsewhere for the "extremely difficult" solution.

This is a great book for people like me who kn0ow excel VBA, but are at the point where they want to go a step further and learn how to write good, strong, maintainable code utilizing all of the technologies accessible through excel and VBA.