Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba) |  | Manufacturer: For Dummies
Buy New: $9.99
as of 3/18/2010 17:40 CDT details
Seller: Amazon.com
Rating:  44 reviews
Format: Amazon Upgrade
Media: Digital
Pages: 1018
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 7.4 x 2.2
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.54
ASIN: B000FQJ9D8
Publication Date: January 13, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
"Today, no accomplished Excel programmer can afford to be without John's book. The value of Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA is double most other books-simultaneously the premier reference and best learning tool for Excel VBA."
—Loren Abdulezer, Author of Excel Best Practices for Business Everything you need to know about: - Creating stellar UserForms and custom dialog box alternatives
- Working with VBA subprocedures and function procedures
- Incorporating event-handling and interactions with other applications
- Building user-friendly toolbars, menus, and help systems
- Manipulating files and Visual Basic® components
- Understanding class modules
- Managing compatibility issues
Feel the power of VBA and Excel No one can uncover Excel's hidden capabilities like "Mr. Spreadsheet" himself. John Walkenbach begins this power user's guide with a conceptual overview, an analysis of Excel application development, and a complete introduction to VBA. Then, he shows you how to customize Excel UserForms, develop new utilities, use VBA with charts and pivot tables, create event-handling applications, and much more. If you're fairly new to Excel programming, here's the foundation you need. If you're already a VBA veteran, you can start mining a rich lode of programming ideas right away. CD-ROM Includes - Trial version of the author's award-winning Power Utility Pak
- Over one hundred example Excel workbooks from the book
System Requirements: PC running Windows® 2000 SP3 or later, or Windows XP™ or later. Microsoft Excel 2003. See the "What's on the CD" Appendix for details and complete system requirements.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 44
 Worth 10 times the price December 3, 2009
Patrick K. Nicholson (Delaware, USA)
I have several of Mssr. Walkenbach's Excel books, and each of them is spectacular in its clarity and usefulness. They're practical and hands-on. Unique to John's publishing model is the enclosed CD containing the entire book in searchable PDF format AND every single example referenced in the book in a .XLS file.
 get ready to markup index and contents! October 12, 2009
a reader (Alameda, CA United States)
Perhaps it's of some use to have the book if you're writing occasional VBA for Excel, but this book is clearly not aimed at developers. If you're not a developer, it will just teach you bad habits and idiosyncratic Excel/VBA usage.
For example, suppose you want to find out whether optional arguments exist (answer: prefix argument name by keyword "optional", and optional arguments must appear after required ones.) To find this information in the book, I searched the index in vain under "optional" and "argument." Then I hunted through endless chatty pages about arguments for sub's. Eventually I happened to discover a nifty "note" icon next to a blurb announcing that additional discussion of arguments appears in the following chapter on functions "including how to handle optional arguments." So then you find what you want in the next chapter.
I think the problems are:
1) As an inbred Excel macro developer, you do not know what a real developer would call things, and so you are in no position to write a general text for a computer literate audience.
2) If it occurred to someone to write the redirection blurb from subs to functions - specifically including the reference to optional arguments - then it was sheer laziness not to include this as a separate index item.
Working with the book is full of experiences like this. Thank goodness that web search has been invented since this antiquated language was conceived!
 Hadn't started Reading this yet... August 28, 2009
D. Cofer
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I haven't started reading this yet, but I keep getting an email to review it. I do know that the other book I got was really helpful and it was by the same guy. It probably is just as good, knowing the author, but since I haven't had any experience in the book I am only going to give it an average rating.
I am not impressed July 12, 2009
Pete Kingree (farifax, va)
I read the Excel Bible by Walkenbach and put just about everything in that book to use. I felt the Excel Bible was pretty good, so I was pleased when I received this book as a gift.
I am an expert in Excel. I have dabbled with macros & VBA, but little more than using the recorder and slight changes to the recorded macro. On my own I learned how to fill a range with looping, but I never created an array in memory.
Religiously, I read this book night and day for about 2-3 months. I was surprised the book opened with very basic Excel information, instead of introducing VBA. It didn't even begin to touch on code for about the first 3 chapters.
When coding was finally introduced in the book, it was not organized. When actual coding was finally introduced, it was like the instruction began at a higher level than what it should. The author kept repeating that this is confusing but it will all make sense later. It was like I started in middle of the book instead of the beginning. The concepts the author promised would make sense later, never did. As I continued through the book I noticed the author jumped from subject to subject touching on them and not explaining them entirely, then would jump back to the subject later and explain a little piece of it. I thought it was ridiculous. It was like there was no logic to the layout of the book.
There is no list of code functions, objects, or any type of comprehensive list of terms. The author says you should use the object browser, or Excel help to find these things. I didn't get the book to tell me to look in the help file. Some things I thought would be useful as I was reading, I would make a mental note of it, and or highlight it. I did this with the Excel Bible and I was able to quickly go to whatever section I needed to get information from, but that did not work with Power Programming With VBA. Because the book does not seem to any logical organization, I found myself spending a great deal of time wither searching the PDF, or thumbing through the pages.
The examples in the book suck. Both the examples in the book used for illustration and the samples in the companion CD. They both suck. All of the looping examples, and array examples use a known amount for the array; for example myarray(1 to 40). In the real world no one writes an array like this. Normally, data is copied from a column or row, maybe calculations performed on it, then it is put back into a spreadsheet. Instead I get examples of how to fill column A with an asending digit up to 40, for example.
Big disappointment.
The only real positive is that I know what I need in a book now. I was at Barnes today and saw exactly what I need there.
Mediocre July 6, 2009
Michael Krause (Silicon Valley, CA)
At first I gave this book a one star, but then felt bad because I still kept using the book and found it was more useful that I first believed. The problem is, he knows too much about Excel and misses too many very minor, yet very important and frustrating details that add hours to programming and are often hard to find online. On the flip side, the book is often overly detailed about other things, something which makes it hard to actually sit down and read it.
This books is about the best of the worst however, by the time you get through 950 pages of endless excel minutia, you might understand lots of incoherent pieces of often useless routines, but you will not have enough understanding of how to easily write a useful program. This book is in no way geared towards any engineering programming, and it does not has a very poor presentation of existing methods, functions, and keywords available in VBA. There is not even an index of VBA commands to reference, which makes finding keywords in a four inch thick book just one more uncesseary challenge for the user.
The book is good for learning the basics and will teach you fundamentals of how lists, buttons, and functions interact, but if you want to create something fully integrated and flexible, find a more succinct and specific book.
The author is very detailed , but he unfortunately misses the global perspective of explaining how to move beyond simple tasks that are often better left to the user anyway. A decent beginners guide, but rapidly becomes obsolete if you understand programming structure but lack VBA syntax.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 44
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