Confession time: I first met Richard in 2003, when he was responsible for programming solutions in Excel and Access for the Investment Bank I was working for. With my own background in mid-range databases (Ingres, Sybase, Oracle), I needed to supplement my SQL knowledge with Visual Basic for Applications. For a while, Richard became my de-facto "tutor", and patiently answered a number of dumb questions that I would throw his direction. In the end, I got a copy of his book, if only to prevent me asking the same questions all the time !
It's not easy writing a book on Excel Macros. The basic problem is that VBA is a fully functional programming language languishing under the covers of the well-known Excel spreadsheet. Should you approach this as a language tutorial, or as an add-on to the familiar spreadsheet concept ? In fact, Richard has taken the "Fully Functional Language" approach. Much of what has been written here is applicable to VBA in , say, Access or Word.
The second problem with this sort of book is what I call the "Object-Orientated Jungle". How soon should you introduce Object concepts ? How detailed should you go ? Should you use a formal approach, or a more "homely" description of what Objects are about ? Again, I think that Richard has hit the nail on the head, by introducing Objects from the perspective of Excel itself - Workbooks / Worksheets / Cells etc. This immediately has the effect of making Objects relevant, and makes subsequent descriptions more meaningful.
This book is packed with chapter after chapter of crisply written explanations, all interspersed with code snippets and screen shots. In a book of this type, it is the example code which really makes the difference. I always look for the "I could use that" factor - sub-routines which can be taken into your own development. There is much that is useful.
One thing which was surprising to me was that all the illustrations appear to be Excel 97 under Windows 98. A common enough technology, but I expected to see the latest and greatest XP Operating system. Fortunately, I had the chance to speak to Richard about this point. He said that Excel 97 was the first version to see the deployment of VBA. Therefore, he decided to use the lowest common version, so he could be confident that all his code would be compatible with future versions. A reasonable argument, but I would have liked to have seen at least some references to XP in the book, even if it was only a few screen shots. Without this, the book can appear to be a bit dated.
This is the sort of book to have on a nearby shelf in the office. If you are getting stuck working on a tricky routine, pick up this book and thumb through to see how Richard has solved the problem already. Keep it nearby.
Richard has been developing software for blue-chip corporations for 20 years. He has produced VBA code in Excel for major projects, including profit-and-loss reporting and business planning and budgeting.
This is not an easy book to write. Yet Richard has succeeded in providing something for everyone, whatever their level of knowledge.
