Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Visual Basic for Applications Step by Step (BPG-step by Step) | 
 enlarge | Author: Reed Jacobson
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $11.50
You Save: $18.49 (62%)
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 124724
Platform: No Operating System
Media: Paperback
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 7.3 x 1.4
MPN: 9780735624023
ISBN: 073562402X
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.54
EAN: 9780735624023
ASIN: 073562402X
Publication Date: May 16, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Experience learning made easy, and quickly teach yourself Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)--one step at a time! Work at your own pace through the easy numbered steps and practice files on CD, and master the fundamentals for using VBA to create custom software solutions and automating tasks in Excel 2007--no developer experience required! You'll learn how to automate spreadsheets, write your own functions and procedures, and customize menus and toolbars. You'll discover Excel Objects, including workbooks, range objects, graphics, and PivotTables . Plus, you'll learn how to chart data from databases and other information sources. With STEP BY STEP, you can take just the lessons you need or work from cover to cover. Either way, you drive the instruction--building and practicing the skills you need, just when you need them! Includes a companion CD with hands-on practice files.
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| Customer Reviews:
This book is a mess! November 7, 2008
A. M. Rosa (Woodside, New York USA)
I don't quite understand how this book got out of the proof-reading and technical review phase and made it to press. There are so many errors in the code and approaches that don't work, that a true beginner to VBA for Excel could easily get lost.
I would want to say that this book is an okay starting point for learning VBA, but I would be afraid that a beginner would get hopelessly confused. I think a better book for learning Excel VBA is VBA and Macros for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 (Business Solutions) by Bill Jelen and Tracy Syrstad.
While I am sure Mr. Jacobson is probably a decent developer and a nice person, he is a sloppy author. He relies too heavily on recording macros and then reworking them to try and teach VBA coding than actually taking the time to explain coding theory and getting you to think how to tackle the problems on your own. Even the fact that he has you type the code first before he explains why is annoying. I would rather the explanation first, giving me a chance to see if I could work the code out on my own, then have him tell me what the most efficient method is. I realize that this is probably also due to the Microsoft Press Step-by-Step formula for writing these books, but that is another reason why I do not like the series as a whole.
There are many typo's in the text with regard to code that wouldn't make the Macro's run if you didn't catch the error and then there are several things that don't work.
Examples:
In Chapter 5, Jacobson steps you through using the Immediate window to open a file, then moving the sheet to an open workbook, then moving it to its own new workbook (He does point out that Excel will not allow you to move the only sheet of a workbook to a new workbook without the interim step). In "simplifying" the recorded macro, he uses the ThisWorkbook object. This approach works fine if you have the code in the module of the holding spreadsheet you initially want to move the newly opened sheet to, as ThisWorkbook will always refer back to the workbook which the VBA module is in, but executing this in the Immediate window will not work because the command you used to open the file in the previous step caused that workbook to become the Active workbook, and thus the ThisWorkbook object is referring to the wrong workbook and the command doesn't work.
Also in Chapter 5: Working with Excel Tables, Jacobson takes you through how to simplify the recorded macro in order to manipulate the table totals and filters. The way he has coded the macro, the Subtotals do not refresh, so when you filter, the subtotals in the totals row are wrong. You need to F2 each of the cells in order for them to update as a simple F9 will not refresh them. While this may be a bug with Excel 2007 Tables and manipulating them with a VBA macro, this should have been tested and at least mentioned.
On the whole it is disappointing that the books published under the Microsoft name lack any sort of quality control standards and are at best basic. You would think that they would have the best insight into the product and would be the most valuable of learning tools for using the products creatively. But they aren't and as a result, I cannot recommend this book.
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