Microsoft Excel VBA Programming for the Absolute Beginner

by Duane Birnbaum

This book not only teaches Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), an excellent first language, it also teaches the fundamental programming concepts you need to grasp to learn your next language. The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931841047
• ISBN13: 9781931841047
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Cengage Learning PTR
• Length: 424 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 7.8" x 0.8"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book for beginners

As a self-taught user, with some help from other self-taught users in my company, I found this book excellent. Ideas that I had a fuzzy grasp of are made clear. I suspect the teaching background of the authors contributes to the clear and concise descriptions of things and to the logical flow of the information. I also bought their Access VBA book, but haven't tackled it yet. I suspect it to be just as helpful. They are probably too basic for an experienced user, but wonderful for beginners.

Not for beginners, but very good

I'd have to agree that this book is not appropriately named. I found understanding the code more difficult than several books aimed at a moderately advanced audience, such as Walkenbach's Power Programming. That said, I found the book offered unique angles and insights not dealt with in other books, and in showing how games can be programmed in Excel, really provided a broad view of the power and flexibility inherent in VBA and the Excel Object model. It was frankly an eye opener to see what Duane was able to do, and I think taking the time to work through the code has been tremendously rewarding, if not particularly easy.

Finally someone who can teach to beginners

I tell you, I must have bought a dozen books related to learning VBA for Excel.This is the first and only one that I can't put down because this author can start from zero and build up without loosing people.Thanks

Previous review is incorrect

You do not need Visual studio installed to run the projects in this book. The errors mentioned in the previous review are caused by changes in the path to the VBA string functions when using Windows XP. You can always just enter the code as is written in the book into a new VBA project using Excel and it will run fine. But the simplest solution is this:1.) Open the project that is giving you trouble.2.) Select 'Move or Copy Sheet...' from the Edit menu.3.) Choose to Move the selected sheet to a new workbook to create a copy.4.) The new workbook should look just like the previous workbook. Only now the library paths will be updated to what's on your computer and the program will work. You will have to save the new workbook or the program will be lost when you close it and you will have to repeat the above steps.This problem should have been caught in the reviewing process but we missed it. Sorry. Please ignore my rating. I had to put something in that field in order to respond.