Holy Macro! It's 1,600 Excel VBA Examples

Rating:
Summary: Excel translates better than German
Review: Good collection of workable macro ideas but beware there is a fair smatterring of untranslated German scraps throughout the samples both in the worksheets and the VBA code.

Most of the differences are idiomatic translation - example the index says: "How can I call a Macro depending on how long the Workbook has been open?" when the real translation is "How can I call a Macro depending on what time the Workbook is opened".

As the VBA code started life in German a number of code samples use German language words as variable names making it a liitle difficult at time to decipher the meaning.

The CD is easy to use but lacks an install to Hard-disk option for the frequent user but that should prove litle challenge for the level of intellect for users likely to access the code.

The code is well laid out and every module is in a separate workbook allowing simple testing and exploration of the idea. Very few of the samples failed to run as promised and most failures relate to version differences in Excel particularly with those who have already migrated to XP - and then its mainly in the samples that use various email techniques or are affected by security levels in the users Excel.

Biggest plus is the cut and paste ability as the modules are laid out well and would satisfy the requirements of the strictest code cutter.

I keep going back to it and am gradually building up a better list of what each sample really does - I guess it was hard to find a translator who was as good at translation as Excel and VBA which is the only detraction from an otherwise great product!

Rating:
Summary: Waste of money
Review: This was a big waste of money (I would pay 10 dollars for it max). The CD has a lot of examples, but they all are for some specific situations, if you do not know VBA you have no way of customizing it to your needs (because you have no idea what each code line does). On the other hand, if you do know VBA why would you use this CD, if you can write your own code.

I was expecting that there will be actually an explanation for each line of the code, but there is none, it just says, this code does this (for example, Combine column text and replace) and then the pure code comes, that is it for explanation part.
If you want to actually learn how to program VBA for excel the best book is "VBA for Modelers: Developing Decision Support Systems Using Microsoft« Excel by S. Christian Albright" (in my opinion the best book currently in the market which ACTUALLY teaches VBA for excel).