Customer Reviews

VBA for the 2007 Microsoft Office System

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This is a great book for those new to VBA. It covers Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook so it does not go into much depth in any particular product. The writing style is easy to follow and all of the examples work. Not for experienced VBA developers.

I have a nagging feeling that for some readers, this book will be their first ever on programming. Perhaps they are heavy Microsoft Office users, and are frustrated by constantly doing repetitive tasks, and want a way to automate these. That is the main motivation for the text.

If this describes you, then McFedries' narrative is a gentle introduction to the overall field of programming. The VBA borrows from its original Basic the characteristic of being easy to understand and code. As you go through the text, you get introduced to key programming ideas, common to all languages. Like using for loops, where a control element iterates over a collection. Then there is the while command for conditional execution only once. Well, VBA calls it the do while command, but more generally, programmers just think of it as while.

The book also introduces you to elementary graphics programming. There are various form controls which are graphical elements that you can cause to popup when the user does certain actions. These give rise to event handling issues, which are true of most graphics coding. Microsoft has built an extensive framework within its Office suite so that you can easily code these objects.

The book provides a lot of great starting information, but then it leaves you hanging. In addition it gives great details on the information it does provide, but that's only a small part of the functionality of VBA. It makes no mention of the other information :(