Absolute Beginner's Guide to VBA

Rating:
Summary: Great introduction to VBA
Review: The book is what it says: for ABSOLUTE beginners. If you have some computer experience and a working knowledge of the MS Office suite and you are ready to begin leveraging the power of VBA, this book is for you. If you are afraid of VBA, have tried VBA before and failed, or know nothing about programming, this book is for you. I found the book to be of the appropriate length ~350 pages or so. There was also plenty of side bar information that did a great job of explaining WHY you would or would not want to do something. Coverage also included "good to know" gotchas that would definately cause a beginner some heartburn.

The Good:

The book starts out with the obvious introductory items like recording macros, building custom macros, programming control structures (if-then, for loops, etc). The book also has an entire chapter that covers "objects". They are well written, easy to follow, and definately target the beginner.

At about Chapter 7 the book begins dedicating one chapter to each of the MS Office (2000) suite - starting with Word. Then Excel, Powerpoint, Access, and even a chapter on Outlook. All the chapters had good BEGINNER examples. The chapter that covers Access has an example of how to move data between Excel and Access - quite useful.

The last few chapters cover more intermediate topics like debugging, custom dialogs, and toolbars. As before, the book does a good job of introducing and illustrating (through useable examples) how to do the task at hand.

All chapters and examples are on topic. Little or no author dialog, no extemporaneous page fill, and no pay-per-page bloat to distract you from the code.

The Bad:

Coverage of each of the specific Office applications is good for a BEGINNER and given the obvious limitations of an introductory book, so don't expect that you are getting a great Excel programming book or an outstanding Access programming book. The Access examples use ADO which is not a bad thing by itself, but the examples use a fairly advanced coding format (short-cut notation) that many beginners may find hard to follow. The Access chapter and code examples leave out most if not all coverage of integrating "Forms" and "Reports" into your VBA code, which is a huge miss IMHO - minus half star. Coverage of printing and print formatting information with VBA is (or is nearly) nonexistent - minus half star.

If you are already familiar with VBA and you are looking for a beginners VBA book for a specific Office product, this may not be the book for you.

If you have always been intimidated by VBA or you "just never could get the hang of it", this is definately the book for you.

Excellent value for the price.

CM

Rating:
Summary: Integrate MS Office Applications
Review: This book is where to start if you are trying to automate Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access. It covers each application's object model (with practical examples) which gives you the confidence to develop in each application.

Absolute Beginner's Guide to VBA's main stength is its conciseness (only ~400 pages with lots of pictures). It is very easy to read; I read the book in 10 hours.

There is only one additional subject that should have been covered in an introductory book: starting applications from within another application - i.e. starting PowerPoint from within Access. The clearest explanation of this topic is in the book "Office XP Development with VBA". I also recommend this book.