Excel VBA Macro Programming

Richard Shepherd | Richard Shepherd

1 Warmly recommended
I recommend this book without hesitation. I bought this as a complete beginner and it has shown me in easy steps how to write effective VBA code. Plenty of worked examples to follow and copy in - I liked this because it gave me something to build on and showed very effectively how the structure of the code worked. Everything is explained well and the chapter structure has been carefully constructed so that it all follows on from each other. The examples have something for everyone and go from simple stuff like code to transpose a selected range of cells in one click to code to auto total rows and columns of a selected matrix of numbers in one click. Very useful on a spreadsheet.

2 Not the best
This book isn't particularly good. It feels as if it were written without a lot of thought. The first 13 chapters are a cursory review of VBA; the examples in Chapters 20-41 are mostly trivial. Many of them could be done faster and more efficiently without resort to VBA. You would be better off with another book such as Walkenbach's.

3 A very good book for experts and beginners
I have found this book extremely useful. As someone with a little programming knowledge already I wanted to find out more about how to program Excel. I was very pleasantly surprised both by how flexible the Excel language is and what a good investment this book is. I have been amazed at how quickly I have been able to grasp the subject. There is a good balance in the book between the theory and the examples and I did not find it heavy going at all.

Best of all the book is the right size to take to the office for easy reference. The book is written by someone who obviously uses Excel VBA day to day and has included plenty of practical examples. I always thought that Excel was just a spreadsheet package but I now have reasonable understanding of the power behind it.

I have just completed my first application and am very proud of it!!!

4 Way to shallow!
The book is ok for the first half hour, then its worthless.

5 Well worth buying
This book has opened up a whole new area of Excel for me. I can now do anything in VBA code within an Excel spreadsheet! My friends at work have become impressed with my Excel code. Recently, my boss was given a spreadsheet with similar information on 50 sheets within one file and he wanted to see it all on one sheet going downwards. Within 15 minutes I was able to produce VBA code to do this transition - he was over the moon!

I work in accountancy so I use Excel spreadsheets very frequently. However, I had only been able to record macros and did not have any understanding of how they worked. This book has taken me from the very basics through to some very complicated code and creating a professional add in file. I found everything was well explained and plenty of working examples were used. It shows how to build GUI interfaces which look really professional.

It describes the Excel Object model in very good detail - I have now realised that the object model is at the heart of the code and you need a very good understanding of this in order to start writing code for Excel. Two chapters are devoted to this.

There are a huge number of tricks explained in this book some of which could be described as hacks. I found out how to copy and view a hidden worksheet which was password protected simply using commands in the object model.

This has certainly whetted my appetite for Excel VBA

6 An excellent book
An excellent book on Excel VBA. Easy to read without any waffle, and plenty of example code and pictures to take you through each subject which I really like.

There are also 21 example projects which start off simply and then work through to more complicated listings, some of which cover several pages of code and include construction of GUI interfaces. All the code is thoroughly explained and is easy to follow through. Several cool topics are included here - I loved the one on how to change shapes of comment boxes.

The final chapter draws all these projects into a professional Excel Addin which sounds complicated, but I managed it. I really felt that I had achieved something when I produced my XLA file and it worked like any other addin! It even set its own menu item up in the Excel menu.

The author hits the nail on the head in the introduction when he mentions learning by example and experimentation. You can read a book on a topic, but you will not learn it unless you put it into action, and this book gives plenty of opportunity to do that.

7 An Excellent book
An excellent book on Excel VBA. Easy to read without any waffle, and plenty of example code and pictures to take you through each subject, which I really liked.

8 deceptively short - find something else
The book has 41 chapters in 296 pages. Most chapters are 3-5 pages long with pictures. All examples are only 4-10 lines of code.

The front cover states that it includes 21 real-world projects. However it fails to state that the longest project is 25 lines long. The chapter on databases is 3 pages with pictures. Skip this and find something with some substance.