Title:
Professional Excel Development
Authors:
Stephen Bullen, Rob Bovey, John Green
ISBN:
780321262509
Publisher:
Addison & Wesley
Year:
2005
Target group:
Advanced users and developers
Ranking:
On a scale from 1 to 5 : 4
On a scale from 1 to 10 : 7.5.
Comments:
The book is targeting power users and professional developers and if You consider Yourself to be in this group then this book is for you.
It's a well written book, with a high technical level and with a good structure.
But as with every book it has its strong parts as well as weak parts. Weak parts in terms of that some chapters are overviews only and do not give any depth on the subjects they cover.
The chapters that cover best practice are all excellent. Here the authors share all their experience & knowledge by discussion application structures, structure for notation, advanced techniques for userforms and toolbars, error handling, debugging and many other things. The chapters also cover how to create and use add-ins and user defined functions (UDFs).
The chapters that deal with VB 6.0 & Excel are all excellent too. A welcome contribution is that this book leverages many of the good techniques we use in MS VB 6.0 into Excel, especially when it comes to userforms.
The book covers in a nice way how to create & use classes, create & use ActiveX DLL and front-loaders for Excel in MS VB 6.0.
A whole chapter is devoted to Visual Tools for Office System (VSTO) and point also out all the present shortcomings of VSTO.
As with every book nowadays this book also includes a chapter about XML which is well written and with a high technically level.
If the above is what You're looking for then this book is a must have.
The following chapters provide overviews of the subjects:
Programming with Database
Data Manipulation techniques
Windows API
Creating XLLs with C#
If You're looking to get more then an introduction or a compressed picture on these subject then there exist other books that will give You more.
The book uses an example, PETRAS Timesheet, to exemplify the subject that is covered in each chapter. Some readers will appreciate it very much while other (like me) will skip it. Anyway, PETRAS timesheet is also well worked out like the rest of the book.
In order to work through both the PETRAS Timesheet case and all the examples the book is given You need to have access to the following softwares:
* MS Office 2003 Professional (minimum requirement for the VSTO-chapter)
* MS Visual Basic 6.0 (no longer available for sale from Microsoft)
* Visual Studio.NET (VB.NET & C#)
* VSTO (Separate tool that require Visual Studio.NET)
Kind regards,
Dennis
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