Reviews for Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft Excel, VBA, and .NET: The Definitive Guide to ... and VBA (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology)

1. Style sacrificed for substance.

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, March 12th, 2010

   As an accountant, I work with Excel day in and day out and unknowingly over the years have developed a fair few Excel applications. The good stuff first. This book is 100% on top of its game and there quite simply is no other book that comes even close to it in terms of technical advice and expertise. It is well laid out and the examples are invaluable. An incredible amount of work and thought has gone into producing this book.
   
   So, to the not-so-good stuff. In a nutshell, why buy a Ferrari when a Ford will do? This book is very technical which whilst trying so hard not to, makes it more like an encyclopaedia than a guidebook. Example- a whole chapter is devoted to VBA naming convention and yes, a basic principal is that there should be consistency. However, the authors go on- for what seems like forever- explaining that 'good practice' is to precede variables with abbreviations to indicate what they relate to. Far from making the code easier to understand, I spent an age trying to get to the bottom of what the code was doing as a consequence.
   
   More importantly, I question where the motive is in all of this? Most finance professionals (and I am not saying that I necessarily agree with this!) would rather buy a dedicated ERP or business intelligence system at this level.
   
   The timesheet example that runs through the book is very simple in principal- I am left questioning as to why it took the authors well over 1000 pages to put bells and whistles on this when a simple spreadsheet with no VBA and little formatting would have done the same basic job. I would have much preferred to have seen many examples of different Excel applications and a discussion of their practical uses.
   

2. Profesional Excel Development

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2009

   This book is very useful if you have a reasonable working knowledge of VBA, that is, more than just recording macros for later editing. It's strengths lie in the way it impresses on the would-be developer the need to follow definite procedures to build an application using the Excel environment as a starting point. It teaches the reader to take a disciplined approach to development.

3. Fantastic Book! BUY IT!!

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2009

   Have just finished reading this book, and it is absolutely superb! Fair enough, it was printed before the days of the 2007 Office/Excel version, however, as I've just discovered, (for those of you who were wondering), all the examples work in the 2007 version also! -ENJOY!!

4. Excellent book but not for beginners

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, October 12th, 2008

   Great book.Learnt a lot about how to develop applications in Excel.Would not recommend it to beginners though.

5. The standard text

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2008

   Brilliant, just don't buy it until you are reasonably confident with the same authors Excel reference or similar - this is not an entry level text. Worth it for the naming conventions alone!