Customer Reviews

Writing Excel Macros

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book is not aimed at absolute beginners, although it pretends to be (it contains short descriptions of other languages, and devotes some time to elementary concepts). It will be appreciated by readers with some minimal programming experience, like all O'Reilly books. For novices, I'd suggest the readable "Excel 2000 for Dummies" by G.Harvey. In brief, the book's virtues are clarity and brevity. 500 pages is below average for a sector full of bloated manuals. These two virtues alone justify the 4 stars of my rating.

The shortcomings are the incompleteness of the treatment. Structures and objects are not really introduced, but you can't have it all in a slim book, and the author in the firy first pages warns the reader that this is a book for average-complexity macros. There are (minor) typos here and there, and in each chapter the author shamelessly promotes other publications and software tools written by him. A more impartial bibliography would have been appreciated. Yet, in my opinion these are minor flaws.

Personally, I would have liked an even more synthetic style in exchange for a more comprehensive treatment. In any event, O'Reilly offers a VBA "nutshell" book that is supposed to be good. The author has also written a book on Object-Oriented-Programming in VBA, edited by Springer-Verlag.

In synthesis, whatever topic the author chooses to cover in the book, he does cover it very well. But some essential aspects of VBA are missing, and they could have been added with little effort. Still, the book is reasonably priced, well written and well edited. Overall, a good buy.

I was excited to see this book because I do a lot of macro programming in Excel. I am not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination but I do know lower level programming quite well.

I'm sorry to say that this book is a big dissapointment. The author starts off by saying that this book is meant for more advanced users but is good for begineers as well. Unfortunately even someone like me, who writes macros all the time, I found the book hard to follow at times. The book mainly lacks because it doesnt have many good examples that begineers can follow or have a good reference section for more advanced people that just need to look up syntax.

Finally, the index of this book is terrible. Don't bother looking there unless you want to find something which is already obvious from the Table of Contents. When I need to reference something I usually just have to flip through the pages until I find it. The author does however plug some sort of program he is written that shows the hierarchy of the Excel VBA. Unfortunately this program will also cost you 75 bucks. The author also throws in some other books he has written that he might like you to buy.

Unfortunately there aren't many books out there to compete with this one. If you need a book on this specific topic and you can deal with a poor index and the author trying to sell you something every so often it is not too bad. However, you are not missing much at all if you pass this one up.

This book is definitely not for beginners and not a good reference to the VBA Basic language or the Excel objects.

The author introduces well the operation of the Excel Visual Basic Editor along with a brief and quite incomplete introduction of the Basic language. A good VBA Basic book is recommended as another side reference. The Excel object models, which are extensive, powerful, and vague, are discussed very well with a lot of examples. Unfortunately, the index at the back of the book lacks considerably such that I was forced to search relevant items by thumbing through the book. The Excel objects are learned mostly from the examples and the use of Excel macro recording facilities. A more thorough and detailed tree structure of the objects would help a lot; instead the author prefers to offer his $79.95 Object Browser software. . The author does share many insights into his experience with Excel objects and offers recommendations to avoid pitfalls. The explanation of the creation of custom menus is quite difficult to understand, however the author does offer sufficient example code to learn it. Recommended for intermediate and advanced programmers. The alternative is Weber's book, which is not better and is more expensive.

I have read several of Steven Roman's books. He knows the subject well, and his information about the VBA development environment is very good, even if it is repeated in several of his VBA and macro books. The information on creating custom toolbars and menus is the clearest that I have seen. He also gives a complete list of all the internal menus, toolbar buttons and icons available in Excel.

On the downside - Mr. Roman is terrible at presenting useful examples. In this book he has a complex example that runs through the text. I prefer that each topic has its own examples. I do not want to build an example application by reading and working through chapters that I am not very interested in, just to be able to work with the examples in the sections I am interested in. The author even mentions that he would normally present the book's material in a different sequence, but that would not follow what is needed for his example.

Other books by Mr. Roman also have these complex examples. He is a professor of mathematics and he uses a Turing engine in his Visual Basic Objects book. A lot of programmers, and would-be programmers, do not have an extensive math background. A more common and mundane example would have been preferable.

i bought steve roman's writing excel macros, but i am extremely disappointed. i purchased the book just on the merits of the publisher, since the best programming books i have are from o'reilly. the author does not have a full grasp of the vba, which he admits on several occasions, in the book. not only that, the book seems to merely flush out the excel object model straight from his little object browser utility. the book failed miserably for my purpose, due to lack of codes to demonstrate the syntax and usage patterns. the book pounded upon the fact that a chart can have multiple chart types embedded in one, yet i am still struggling how to add chartgroups within a chartobject, let alone tweak the cosmetic appearances of individual chartgroup. obviously this is not my virst vb book or vba book, and i have been coding for living for many years. i feel absolutely schwindled in steve roman's gimmick to sell his utility

The author refers to his book as "An introduction to programming in Excel VBA". This is totally a misleading description. This is NOT a first book in programming. If you are new to this subject and looking to read a first introductory book then stay away from this book. Otherwise, you will be totally confused and will give up in frustration way before you finish the book.

Having said that if you do have some experience programming and playing around with Excel Macros then you will not be disappointed. The author provides you in a compact and succint manner with the fundamental concepts necessary to carry out the programming projects in Excel VBA. This is not a reference book to look up things. This book is meant and written to be read starting from first chapter and on. It is probably useless if you have a specific project or task in mind but it is great as far as giving you a general map how all Excel VBA projects should be organized and be tackled.

I enjoyed this book because the Author knows his subject well and cuts quick to the chase. Many other books in this area bore you with such a slow pass as not to lose anyone. The text has few detailed examples, it's mostly a narrative read. The book does need some prior knowledge, I read it as a refresher and it worked just fine.

This book may be useful to the experienced VBA programmer. But for the novice, it's next to useless. The book contains no programming examples to speak of. The instructions on VBA are scant. The author says that he doesn't "holdhands." He doesn't explain EXCEL macros very well either!

This book appeals to those who are not developmentally challenged. For me, it's one of the best books on the market on straight EXCEL VBA. A complementary book is Microsoft Excel 97 Visual Basic by Reed Jacobson. (This book assumes you know less about EXCEL than Steven Roman's text, but it still greatly appeals to one's intelligence. It's better to start with Reed Jacobson and then almost at once begin to study Steven Roman's book in parallel.) If you posses a self-proclaimed DC personality (...), then you might want to try SAMS Teach Yourself Microsoft Excel 2000 Programming in 21 Days by Matthew Harris. I find this book verbose and cross-grained, but one person, at least, whom I work with, distributed it to students of an in-house course on EXCEL VBA, which he taught.

I find this book to be an indispensable resource in my work customizing Excel for a global financial institution. Being a self-taught programmer, I find some of the text a huge bore and mainly use the code examples, rewriting it to fit my needs. I do not waste my time going through his exercises because they seem laborious and I need fast answers. For that, however, it has proved itself invaluable. I will admit that the examples are so plain vanilla in here that you have to know how to use Excel and VBA to apply them to actual situations. Without this book, though, just having those manuals isn't enough. It really fills out the missing info. When you find yourself stuck, you'll be glad you have it.