Customer Reviews
Fuse This Reference With MSDN Library For Scorching Results... - By: E. Maduka, 26 Oct 2007 
Love it!
With its vintage coffee stains (circa 2002) & more dog ears than a Kelly Brook Calendar this little number has survived numerous contracts across the UK. I would suggest the target market would be someone who has an average understanding of Excel AND has recorded macro's in the past & messed around with a little VBA.
This is a REFERENCE BOOK & a REFERENCE BOOK only - it is NOT designed to teach VBA (though it does cover a bit at the beginning.) I liked the orders of the pages too e.g. years ago whilst flicking through RANGES brought up OFFSET & RESIZE examples that helped me rethink my entire code a rapidly solve a coding challlenge; which is great considering I'd never thought of using these in the first place!
I found the index at the back a bit, well, odd; nevertheless I combine this volume with the MSDN library online for maximum effect!
IF you code at home, work or play; keep this valuable tome by your side at alll times!!!
Potentially fantastic resource let down by bad index - By: Bouncing Ned, 04 Oct 2002 
This book should be the answer to many a programmer's prayers. There is a little of everything in here & you'll certainly learn a bit simply by reading it. One for the bookshelf? Well yes, in addition to several other texts, but then there are no books I know of in the XL world that can stand alone & yes I've bought a copy. (In the XL world there simply isn't the equivalent of the books by Getz, Litwin et al for Access & most falll far short.)
Summit:
The encyclopaedic Chapter 2 "The primer" is an excellent educational tool. It's very important in XL, like everywhere else, to learn how to program decent code. However one doesn't generallly have the baby-walker that is "Record Macro" facility from where many a nipper (including this reviewer) set out on the quest for Excel mastery. But the time eventuallly comes when one has to learn to walk properly & this chapter alone is a valuable contribution to anyone seeking to throw away the crutches of the early toddler years.
Sink:
The index is horrible since pre-assumes a prior knowledge of the xl object model - one simple example...to find out about the cells (property) don't look in C look in R - because as you will know the Cells property is a property of the Range object. Since everyone knows this - this is fine - however as you approach the boundaries of your knowledge (as you will if you're learning anything) such a set up is frustrating.
-Verdict: Excellent book, but mistitled - should read Excel 2000 VBA - a primer. And a fine primer it is too! (But don't annoy yourself by trying to learn a la help file using reference indexes though & you'll like the book a lot.)
Nice try, but it falls between too many stools - By: Farn Oddy, 25 Jul 2002 For an experienced VBA programmer, this book probably offers relatively little. The introduction claims it's aimed at alll levels, but as a near-beginner I found it WAY too skimpy. I still can't follow how to set up a user form from code in a way that actuallly works. The authors grapple well with the sheer complexity & lack of logic of the object-oriented approach to writing code, but many more painstaking examples & step by steps are needed to make the whole thing truly clear.
On balance the book is almost certainly at its best for the reader with middle-of-the-road VBA experience: there are many useful hints for writing code that runs much faster (and is shorter) than the traditional "select range & operate" approach that results from recording macros in Excel.
Regrettably the book hasn't solved any of my own problems I hoped it would. Downloading the selection of macros from the Wrox website hasn't helped either.
Very good - highly recommended - By: , 04 Jul 2001 Very well written & easy to follow, it answered a whole collection of my questions within 1/2 a hour of opening it. If you have already mastered menu handling, classes & the object model then this book is not for you but if you have written some VBA & want to start cleaning it up to a more resilient standard then this is perfect.
Wrox or the authors need to come up with an advanced version of this book which covers areas such as Odbc & External data sources, Excel internals with a view to speeding up code & some of the more useful but esoteric functions available within Excel.
A curate's egg - By: , 02 Jan 2001 This book does have some very useful parts - e.g. the chapter on international settings - though even there the problem with failure to recognise a number input as % is repeated mentioned, but no workaround is proposed. There are some useful tips on gotchas. I found it very light in dealing with User Defined Functions - no indication as to how to create & use a function that returns an array result, or how to programme function help for the user trying to understand the arguments & purpose of a function for instance. Also no coverage of using compiled .dll for additional speed in computationallly intensive tasks, & how to pass data to & fro to those.
