Gives you a taste of what you can do with VBA
This book shows at a very high-level, what you can do with VBA in all of those MS Office applications.The only problem with this book is that every piece of information can be gathered from MSDN.
If you are not sure what VBA is, or how you can use other Microsoft Products in you Visual Basic projects, then get this book. It will be a real eye-opener.
Not Bad for a broad overview
This book is a good starting point before you go out and buy that 2 inch thick book on your individual office component. This book does not go into advanced concepts, it is moreover a guide to Office's object model. I felt that it left many important concepts out. The selection of what was important in Excel was sporadically helpful. I started out with this book, but needed additional references to drill into the specifics. I've *never* accessed data the way they say to in Access, nor would I. There is a discussion section in the back with suggestions on how to use the Office suite to solve problems, but no specifics.
shallow coverage - 700+ pages should have done a better job
This book covers a lot of topics - but lacks in-depth explanation on many important stuffs. I tried to reference the book to help me with some Excel automation. However, the 40 Excel pages in the book helps only a little. Not a single word on 'charts', poor presentation on 'Range', no mention of Excel built-in functions... MS user's guide or online help is much better. The coverage on other parts look just like the Excel.
Good basic book, but leaves too much out.
I have programmed and used Word Basic, but this book left me feeling a little lost. The book was written by several people who appear to assume that some subjects will be covered in a different chapter. Other topics were covered more then once. I was disappointed and am still not able to create a comphresive macro in VBA.
Best deal for VBScript , ActiveX and VBA combined.
For VBA, BUT WAIT -- on the CD are the complete books SE:Using ActiveX and SE: Using VBScript, making this sort of a three-for-one. I bought this one and did not even realise it -- I got so used to a lot of the same-old junk on CD! On the companion disk go to the ActiveX folder, activex.htm and you will have their ActiveX Resource Center... which can bring the two other books up on the CD, nice and quick, and also links to Office 97 resources and other stuff. Que books can tend to be a bit too general, but this has a lot of info and is more succinct than most offerings from Que. If you are starting out with scripting hoping to roll your knowledge over to Office Apps someday, then this is the BEST DEAL you will ever get.
