Rating:  Summary: Best I have Seen - so far Review: This book looked very good the first 30 seconds I picked it up. It covered a special topic I was interested in and I bought it. Once I brought it home and looked through the whole book, I was amazed at all of the helpful information inside. It has enhanced my programming skills immediately and it will for you too. Well worth the purchase!
Rating:  Summary: Excellent Reference Review: This is a great Excel VBA reference book. Very thorough. The only Excel reference I use. Simple to understand yet has complex projects in small doses, so it doesn't fall into the traps Wrox books sometimes do: "The next 400 lines of code is a Hello World program." Hello! Get a grip. Even complex ideas can be explained simply. This book is proof.- Jim Stiene...
Rating:  Summary: Not for beginners Review: Although I am an experienced user with excel, I purchased this book to help take me to the next level. Being a novice programmer, I found at times the examples difficult to translate for practical use. I often found myself wishing I had another book to cross reference to further my understanding. The examples were good and supported th context of the book but found it cumbersome to make the transition.
Rating:  Summary: You will use this ! Review: Having this book for even the short time since I bought it has been like having an "instant success kit" that transforms me into an Excel VBA Guru. Its organization, layout, and even simply its appearance make it a pleasure to use and a massively useful companion for developers. Another thing I like about it is that, unlike most books - which are either comic-book level manuals (i.e., glorified pamphlets) for non-technical people, or super-technical tomes of gobbledigook that won't help you do anything until you've mastered at least the first 800 pages - you can actually use this book for any level of expertise you'll need, anywhere from "I just want to get a user form in there for filling in a template" to "I'm gonna knock their socks off by integrating this into their business objects layer with logic-driven pivot table creators" The explanations are coherent, the examples are clear and well-illustrated, and the companion CD has a lot of pre-written code you can plagia... um, learn from in developing your own solutions.
Rating:  Summary: Interesting but... Review: This book contains many examples, but I found the explainations lacking. In most cases, he hit the highlights of a bit of programming, but left a lot unexplained. Can I do more than before reading the book? Yes. Do I understand a lot of what I can do? No. I can use bits and pieces from the examples but I do not understand the reason so I can not generate it code from scratch. I suggest this for someone who wants many examples for reference.
Rating:  Summary: Makes VBA accessible even to novices of macros Review: If you're new to macros, and mere mention of "VBA" turns you off, this book will convert you. It's quite readable. His examples actually helped me in my office work. I had written Lotus macros, but never in Excel. I read this book over the weekend, and on Monday wrote some VBA macros that have really simplified my work.
Rating:  Summary: Simple explanations for a complex subject Review: In the same way that PC World columnist, John Walkenbach, simplified our lives with 'Excel 2000 Formulas', he has now enriched them with 'Power Programming with VBA'. If you've already mastered Excel and need to develop customized applications, this book will soon have you deep into the inner workings of VBA to get you up and writing code without delay. As with his other books, his style is clear and precise, and the text is arranged in a simple-to-reference way. The page layout is excellent, giving easy-on-the-eye icon notes, references and tips. Even so, as with 'Excel 2000 Formulas' I quickly found myself in charge of a colored highlighter picking out the bits that were important to me. The author also has a flowing style of writing so you don't feel you're working through a manual, It's more like a fun day out, with new discoveries on every page. VBA had always remained something of a mystery to me until I got stuck into 'Power Programming'. Now (still with a bit of prompting) I'm really getting the hang of it, and finding, again, that I can streamline my workbooks and impress my colleagues.
Rating:  Summary: Excellent but not perfect Review: No book on programming can be perfect given the different learning styles we all have, and the different needs of the readers. But for me, this book still sits on my desk and is often used. I knew practically nothing about VBA before sitting down with the book and Excel to custom program a very sophisticated app in Excel at my job. Without Mr. Walkenbach's book (and website, and a little help from Google groups) there is NO way I could have done it. Also, Mr. Walkenbach responded to my questions the same day-- very cool. But there were some problems-- information can be a little scattered (although that could be due to my deadline pressure, trying to find just the right thing). And sometimes what I was looking for wasn't there or didn't make sense in the context of what I needed. But that's why I said no book is perfect. Still, it worked for me, and if you are needing to learn VBA and program Excel, I think this book is tops...
Rating:  Summary: a 800 hundred-page book, but could use a few more pages Review: I believe the author has a very good knowledge of Excel and VBA. And the book has a through coverage of them. Unlike some of the reviewers, I find some of the stuff in the first few chapters that cover the non-VBA stuff useful. For example, how to enter a carriage return within a cell, add items to the menu bars. They are elements of the whole VBA package. However, the author seems getting impatient when coming down to core VBA stuff. I believe that a good programming book has to give detailed explanation to syntax and examples, such as a space is needed here, or 'UsedRange' means this and 'Parent' means that in 'Intersect(arglist(arg).Parent.UsedRange. arglist(arg))'. It even does not hurt to explain twice in different locations of the book. When I am uncertain about the stuff I am reading, I never feel comfortable in reading on. The same logic applies to functions, events and properties. The author did mention to use Excel help to get more information, and I think he expects readers to go there instead of him explaining what it is. For example, he used the Space function as in "WinPath=Space(???)" without evening touching the meaning of it. The above sluggish style comes after the author spend 11 pages in explaining excel history, the merging/buying of companies that produce Excel-relevant products or even what a useless Excel 2.1 chart looks like. I would also have to agree with other reviewers in that the organization of the book could be thought out better.
Rating:  Summary: Good book Review: A decent book, worth getting. Somewhat text-heavy (as programming books tend to be), it still contains a number of good illustrations and screenshots to effectively teach you. The first three sections cover the fundamentals of Excel and VBA; the next three deal with programming and development topics such as user forms, pivot tables, and event handling; the final section covers miscellaneous issues like compatibility, file manipulation, and class modules.
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