Needing to finish my first Excel add-in, and frustrated by the incompleteness and obscurity of MS's help system, I picked up this book after reading warm recommendations from readers of earlier versions.If you have never programmed Excel before, but have programmed a tiny bit in some other language, and do not have great ambitions for software development, this might be a fine text. It is quite readable and full of useful information. Walkenbach introduces VBA quickly, which is great, but so quickly he forgets to say what most of the language constructs do. His approach to teaching the Excel object model is to provide several fairly well written examples of little macros and utilities, each one with a clear English explanation. Unfortunately, if the technique you need does not appear in any of these examples, you are out of luck, because his explanations are neither extensive, detailed, nor thorough enough to impart a good understanding of what is going on. This, coupled with Excel's erratic behavior (mis-type a property name and watch your user form mysteriously disappear, for instance), makes it very difficult to become independently productive without spilling a lot of sweat and tears.
The book's strengths include the numerous and well-organized examples provided on the companion CD; the occasional sidebar that offers first-hand knowledge of bugs, inconsistencies, and strange design; fairly broad, if incomplete, coverage of the major aspects of Excel VBA programming; and very clear indications of differences among various Excel versions (97, 2000, 2003 mainly). Walkenbach is obviously an expert and has been so for a long time.
The weaknesses become apparent in contrasting this book with, say, Roman's text (O'Reilley). Where Walkenbach gives a macro to display all the icons associated with the several thousand Excel 'FaceId's, Roman publishes the complete table as an appendix. Where Walkenbach loosely skims over the properties of many key objects, such as ranges and charts, Roman takes the time to provide a terse but useful description of nearly every property, as well as a very illuminating diagram of the object hierarchy. Where Walkenbach completely omits to describe how VBA works, Roman actually offers a deeper explanation (showing how object references are arranged in memory, for instance, and describing exactly how a for..next loop is executed). Boring stuff for some, maybe, but a huge time saver for those who appreciate that the details matter. For someone who either has a lot of programming experience, or who plans to develop more than toy utilities or one-off apps in Excel VBA, Roman's approach is much more useful than Walkenbach's.
If Walkenbach is appropriate for your background and ambitions, then you will probably agree it is a four- or five-star effort. Otherwise, you will likely be somewhat disappointed and, like me, will quickly find yourself looking for another book.
