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Rating: 
Summary: Great buy !!!, You won't be sorry to buy it!
Review: I have been using John Walkenbach's VBA book for several years starting 2000 version and one of the best investments I have ever made in terms of book.
You don't have to read the book all, you just decide what you wnat to do and quickly find it in the book. Then the examples are great and helpful. I owe everything I know in Excel VBA to this book and had written programs with 16000+ line codes of VBA.
If I ever write a book, I wish I could do as good as John Walkenbach.
Rating:
Summary: Great book to read cover-tocover and use as a reference!
Review: I was blown away by this book. When it arrived, I started thumbing through it and learned something new within five minutes. Though I've been an Excel user for years and have been doing programming in Excel for some time, I started reading this book from page one and couldn't stop.There is so much to learn from this book for all users (beginners through advanced) and it makes an excellent reference book. John writes in a way that is understandable, down-to-earth, and practical. His examples are real-life solutions to real problems. A great investment and highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Great book to read cover-tocover and use as a reference!
Review: I was blown away by this book. When it arrived, I started thumbing through it and learned something new within five minutes. Though I've been an Excel user for years and have been doing programming in Excel for some time, I started reading this book from page one and couldn't stop. There is so much to learn from this book for all users (beginners through advanced) and it makes an excellent reference book. John writes in a way that is understandable, down-to-earth, and practical. His examples are real-life solutions to real problems. A great investment and highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: If you buy only one VBA book...
Review: My principal occupation for the last 13 years has revolved around Excel macros and VBA. Walkenbach's Excel books have been lifesavers.
Just reading one page in this book pulled me out of a ticklish problem constructing a menu. The code examples are complete and always accurate (and well annotated).
My first 15 minutes with this book saved me the cover price in not having to stop what I was doing to search the web for an obscure instruction.
If you do any programming in Excel; buy this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Buy a book to match your background and needs
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for beginner - intermediate / transitioning
Review: This is a great book for those that are
-Advanced Excel users, but Beginner / Intermediate with VBA
-Programmers that are picking up VBA (Me)
Not for
-Basic Excel users
-Advanced VBA programmers
General Outline
The author steps through the basics of spreadsheets and spreadsheet applications before introducing VBA, and does well covering most of the aspects of Excel.
Good - This is a weighty tome, coming in at over 1,000 pages, and is an overall excellent reference to those that are starting to use VBA.
- Contains excellent overview of using VBA with Excel, with extensive coverage of userforms and all their controls, and actual programming.
- Gets deep into Excel specific features like charts and pivot tables
- Excellent coverage of the differences (and possible problems) with different versions of Excel.
- FAQ and Appendixes that are actually helpful and provide useful information
Bad - Not too much to really pick on here, but I generally dislike books that are filled with some extraneous information, just to get that "Ultimate Reference" look about them. The chapter "Excel 2003:Where it came From", and the sometimes overly inflated explanations seemed liked padding. But otherwise a GREAT book.
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