Pro Excel 2007 VBA

Abstract

Having spent the past ten years writing code for Microsoft Office products, I jumped at the chance to write a book on VBA programming. Before moving to VB 6.0 and subsequently .NET, I was primarily focused on solutions for Microsoft Access, but I'd always had a soft spot for Excel. After working through this book, you'll discover that the latest version of Excel (2007) offers a rich set of tools that enable you to develop user-friendly data-centric applications. And I promise, after you've dabbled in Excel programming, you'll never look back. In this book, I'll show you how to leverage Excel to retrieve data from a database, how Excel can read and write data from non-database sources like XML and text files, and how Excel can be used as a data collection tool. And since Excel is an integral part of the Microsoft Office suite, I'll show you how easily it integrates with the other Office products. You'll also see that Excel makes an extremely capable and extensible reporting tool. Excel is often overlooked as a solution, since more powerful database tools such as Microsoft Access are available, but as you'll see in the pages of this book, Excel 2007 has plenty of uses of its own. You don't have to look very far to find a place for Excel in your work. If you think back to how often users export data from reports they receive into spread-sheets for analysis, you might see an opportunity to bring your reports directly into Excel. I hope that when you've finished working through the examples and recipes I've provided in this book, you'll agree that Excel 2007 provides an easy-to-use yet extremely powerful programming environment. Data input, data output, charts, reports, and integration—Excel does it all.