Customer Reviews

Writing Word Macros

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I am a programmer and have been looking for a source to give me a heads up on VBA and Word macros. This book misses the mark. While I knew VBA was a subset of VB, I didn't realize that VBA was much closer to VB than a simple scripting language. While this isn't a bad thing, the first half of the book attempts to cram all the VB skills needed into small paragraphs. There is just enough detail to make a novice dangerous and frustrated. When I finally got to the meat of the book, the Word object, Roman states that he won't be going into it in detail, but only briefly. I bought the book just so I could find out about the Word object!

Another item that becomes readily apparent is that Roman felt the need to bulk up the book by restating meaningless statistics at every opportunity. I easily read 5-6 times that there are 188 Word objects compared to Access' 51 (like it matters) or Excel's 184 (so what?). After stating it in paragraphs numerous times, he even shows a graph comparing the different applications objects. He also spends a good amount of time plugging other books he has written or software he has for sale. The book does contain enough detail to learn the basics of Word Macros, but if you're already a programmer, you probably wont get enough detail to satisfy you. If you are new to programming, you may get frustrated by the scant detail on the VBA language itself.

I must admit that I'm a bit baffled by some of the other reviews I have read of this title. This is, quite frankly, a superb book -- although perhaps not suitable for absolute beginners.

I have programmed in several other languages, but have only lately had the need to attack VBA for some projects at work, and found Word's online help frustratingly incomplete. This book's strength is that it complement's the online help and provides a deeper insight into how VBA "thinks." Other readers apparently were looking for more of a cookbook, with lots of full-figured, prewritten code, but I found that the code examples in the book, though short, provided *immediate* solutions to some problems I was facing in the code I was writing, and were sufficiently modular to be easily played-with and adapted to what I was doing. I also found another reviewer's accusation of bloat and padding in the book to be very much off the mark -- the density of useful information on a typical page of this book is much higher than in many computing titles I've read.

Bottom line: anyone with some background coding in other languages, who finds themself in the position of having to solve problems in the Word macro environment, should snap this book up at the bargain price. [An added kudo for Amazon.com: I ordered this book (admittedly with second-day shipping) from Amazon.com on Thursday afternoon, and had it in my office the next morning. That excellent order-fulfillment performance proved particularly valuable for me on this go-round!]

I needed a book to carry me over from WordBasic to VBA. While the book was helpful, I found the examples woefully inadaquate.

I, nor anyone else in my office, is writing a book, so the examples relating to writing 'this' book, seemed foreign. More examples of data selection and range manipulating would be more useful. However, the chapter covering tables was useful, and I refer to it often.

I thought the book struggled with keeping elementary and advanced concepts seperate.

I would not recommend this book for a first time macro user, but rather someone who has had some experience with Visual Basic or WordBasic.

I just finished reading this book from cover to cover. I think it is excellent and I am wondering what the reviewers from Bothel and Sugar Hill read? I guess the reviewer from Sugar Hill must have read a different book, because he mentions that he bought the book to learn about the "Word object" and he says that Roman says he won't cover that object in detail. THERE IS NO WORD OBJECT IN THE WORD OBJECT MODEL and Roman does not say that there is (as far as I could tell). It's too bad that reviewers don't take a little more responsibility for accuracy before posting a review of someone else's work. How can we trust reviews otherwise?

As someone who has been making a living writing Office macros for the past three years, I'd say this is the book I refer to most often. I taught myself Word VBA with this one book, after having briefly studied Excel VBA with SAMS Excel Programming (Podlin/Webb).

Even now that I'm working in XP, the book is as useful as ever as a quick reference for solutions to common tasks, for descriptions of Word objects, and answers when "Help" is no help at all.

It's certainly possible to learn Word VBA from zero with this book, but if you prefer a structured 'teach yourself' course with excercises, then you'd better get another book to go with this one. A good start might be Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Word 2000 Automation in 24 Hours.

This book was not much help to me, goes into theory to much and not enough examples, I recommend to anyone wanting to learn VBA to buy Word 2000 Developer's Handbook by Guy Hart-Davis.

This is probably the best book one can buy for learning VBA and Word. That said, one should also note that it is a terrible book. The trouble is that there is no other book available that covers this subject.

I refer to this book all the time I am trying to program VBA, but most of the time the book is no more help than what I can get by using Microsoft help. I have wasted hundreds of hours (no exaggeration) trying to find out information that should be in this book but is not there. He makes a plug for you to send him money for his "enhanced object model browser" because the one in Word "gives only a flat one-dimensional view of the object model" whereas his is "two-dimensional". He nowhere explains what he means by those terms, and the illustrations he gives do not help one either.

Before buying this book you should first be a professional programmer who uses VBA already. Mr. Roman assumes you know many things that he will not explain. That might be OK if he would give more programming examples so that one could try to extract from the examples the steps that his book does not explain. On a more positive note, Mr. Roman likes to explain things that most persons who buy this book already know: the different kinds of variables, the importance of declaring variables before using them, and so forth.

It would have been better if in the draft stage he had had some neophyte try to work with what he had written so that he would know where he contradicts himself and where he leaves out material one has to know to make things work. A better solution would be for him to read John Walkenbach's "Excel ... Power Programming with VBA" and then try to imitate that for Word.

One wishes that someone else could write a book on VBA for Word. I hope Mr. Roman's students at CSU Fullerton have the opportunity to ask him questions to get him on the right track when he is unclear. Unfortunately his readers do not have that ability.

This is a great introduction to Word VBA. The first 100 pages are general background on programming and VBA. The strength of the book is in its explanations of the Word object model. It also has nice example code, e.g., "Adding, Opening, and Saving Documents".

If you have only one Word VBA book, this one will do quite nicely.

I think the review from "A reader from Lawrenceville" got it right.

It is not a good book. It is mostly a list of the various classes and their properties and methods. It can be useful for getting an overview, but it soon becomes tedious.

It does not cover vital suff like Word application event handling.

I suppose the only reason that it still sells is that all the other Word VBA books are out of print.

I found that this book was helpful, but only if I needed to write VBA macros within a word document. It would have been nice if it could have been expanded to show how to write the same macros external of a specific document and so could be used universally. Still, the author did in fact say that that was out of the scope of this book, so I really cannot complain too much. All in all, I found this book useful, especially for someone like me who's not very much into Visual Basic.