The tutorial, accounting for half of the book, covers the various mechanisms available for referring to particular files, sheets, cells, and ranges of cells. It also addresses the graphical representation of data--particularly in charts--and explains the most important aspects of controls and the events they generate. Green--unlike many VBA authors--covers internationalization issues in considerable depth. This is the best VBA book on the market for those planning to write programs for a multilingual usage of Excel. There is also a VBA primer that covers critical VBA syntax and the essentials of object-orientation as it applies to the Excel environment.

The two reference sections--one for Excel's VBA objects and one for the VBA Extensibility (VBE) environment--make up the last half of Excel 2000 VBA Programmer's Reference. The references are comprehensive, but they're organized in a strange way--they list properties, methods, and events with their names, return data types, and descriptions in columns. This would be okay, but when an object's list of members extends over several pages it's impossible to be immediately sure of which object the list refers to. The object name ought to appear on each page. --David Wall

Product Description
Excel 2000 is an import part of the Office 2000 program suite, and will be available in the Premium, Professional, Standard and Small Business editions of Office 2000. Excel has traditionally been the Office suite spreadsheet program par excellence. It still remains that way, but with Office 2000 there is a strong emphasis on between-application automation, ease of use, and the smart new bells and whistles that 2000 brings. Using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), the user can program his or her own programs in what is essentially a subset of the Visual Basic programming languages. This is tremendously powerful, as it allows you to create great User Interfaces (forms etc), as a front end to actual spreadsheet and database storage and manipulation. This continues to be one of the great strengths of programming Excel VBA. This book presents a full reference to the Excel object model, which is essentially the object-oriented system of organizing the functional capacities that make up the Excel program. There will be a short introduction to VBA itself, and the rest of the book will document aspects of programming Excel through that object model. This book will be in three broad sections: the first part introduces Excel and VBA; the second offers interesting, thematic discussions of some of the capacities available to Excel VBA. The third and final part offers a full reference to the object model of Excel.

This book can be compared to Kofler "Definitive Guide to EXCEL VBA", which is 776 pages of exposition and pages 777-834 a listing of the most useful parts of the EXCEL Object Model, ADO, MS forms, Office, Binder, Scripting, VBA and VBE. Thus, you get a much more extensive discussion of how things work and how things fit together than is found in Green (or in Walkenbach, for that matter). Kofler also deals with international issues here and there. However, Green is a lot cheaper, and sometimes its compactness makes it easier to find things.

Bottom line: Buy Green first (cheapest), Kofler second and Walkenbach last


Excellent Programmer's reference for professionals   August 15, 1999
 14 out of 15 found this review helpful

As a professional VBA programmer, I found this book to be an excellent reference. Although I use Excel 97, many of the programming concepts are the same as for Excel 2000. Each chapter maps well onto real-world issues that are likely to come up in an intensive programming environment. A good example of this is the chapter on International issues: I have recently been involved in developing a system installed in several countries across Europe, where the users previously had to switch to UK settings in order for the system to work. The book is not intended as a 'learn to program' guide, a genre which is too heavily catered for already, rather as a programmer's reference laid out in such a way as to find solutions to real-world problems quickly.


If you're stuck with VBA, get unstuck. Buy this book.   December 3, 1999
 13 out of 14 found this review helpful

I've just started my Ph.D. and bought Excel 2000 VBA to help me get to grips with processing my data files. My first impression was of a book that is jam-packed with information, although the smallish typeface may be off-putting to some at first. My second impression was that John Green and his crew are a bunch of mind-readers. Every code sample seems to address exactly the sorts of problems that I had been pondering for the past month. This was my first book on VBA, and it has really opened up the topic for me. On the strength of it bought Word 2000 VBA by Duncan McKenzie (with which I am also very pleased).


All the reference detail I needed - and example code too!   July 28, 1999
 13 out of 14 found this review helpful

I have been writing Excel-based VBA applications for years and always struggled to find a good reference for various functions, properties, and objects. I recently moved up from Excel 97 to Excel 2000 and was struggling. I had continued to use my old Excel 5.0 references because I had trouble finding newer ones that contained substabtial information. Some of my old VBA code wasn't working in Excel 2000 (VBA has been enhanced considerably since Excel 5.0)so I was stuck. I found this book listed at Amazon.com and ordered it as a trial. If you're an Excel 2000 user who writes a lot of VBA code, this book is the reference I recommend. There are some reviews here that complain about the format of this book not matching other Wrox publications and being harder to use. That may be true - I haven't used other Wrox publications - but I found everything I needed and a few extras in here. It's not the only Excel 2000 VBA reference I have on my shelf - check out Microsoft Excel 2000 Power Programming with VBA by John Walkenbach and SAMS Teach Yourself Excel 2000 Programming in 21 Days by Matthew Harris - they're both good references as well.


Horrible index   April 8, 2002
 13 out of 14 found this review helpful

This book would have gotten 4 stars from me if it were not for the index. For example, in one short block of code, I tried looking up Resize, What:, LookAt, xlWhole, LookIn, and Is Nothing. Resize is found in the index under "Range," and the only reason I found it is that they are both under "R." As for the others, I have no idea where to find them in the book. Or try looking up less obscure items like Offset, Integer, InStr, GetName, or Get anything (there are no listings for "G" in the index). With the ability to create a computerized index, there is no excuse for this laziness. It cuts the usefulness of the book in half. You need another book with a good index to find almost anything.

If you are relentless in finding a solution, you can slog your way through this book a page at a time, and you just might find exactly what you need. But then again, you might not.