Microsoft Office Programming: A Guide for Experienced Developers

By using the same back-end macro programming language, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Microsoft Office applications allow users to easily transfer their VBA programming skills from one Office product to another. A developer skilled at using VBA to program Access can quickly learn to program Word or Excel. Better still, VBA is a fairly complete subset of Visual Basic (VB). That means a VB developer already knows how to use VBA, and a VBA programmer knows a lot about VB.

Author Rod Stephens gives you the most valuable information possible as quickly as possible without rehashing the trivial VB and VBA details you already can recite in your sleep. In Microsoft Office Programming: A Guide for Experienced Developers, Stephens skips the tiresome explanations of variable declarations and dives right into serious Office programming topics, such as automatically customizing menus and toolbars with VBA, making Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) do your work for you, and using ADO to manipulate data in an Access database.

By using the same back-end macro programming language, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Microsoft Office applications allow users to easily transfer their VBA programming skills from one Office product to another. A developer who is skilled at using VBA to program Access can quickly learn to program Word or Excel. Better still, VBA is a fairly complete subset of Visual Basic (VB). That means a Visual Basic developer already knows how to use VBA and a VBA programmer knows a lot about Visual Basic. In addition to this large body of shared information, learning to program Office applications requires that the developer understand each application's specific features. For example, to write VBA code for Microsoft Word, the developer must understand Word's capabilities and how to make Word do useful things. Unfortunately most VB and VBA books assume the reader is learning to program from scratch. They ignore the large amount of VBA programming information that is shared by the applications and they teach all of the details starting with the basics. A programmer who wants to learn how to program several Office applications must buy separate books for each application with a huge amount of overlap. Microsoft Office Programming: A Guide for Experienced Developers covers only the material not shared by all of the Office applications. It focuses on the more advanced techniques that start where the other books' VBA tutorials end. It explains how to link the applications together using OLE, how to manipulate each application with VBA code, and how to make the applications work together by controlling each other.

In a previous incarnation, Rod Stephens was a mathematician.

During his stint at MIT, he discovered the joys of algorithms and graphics, and has been programming professionally ever since. During his career, he has worked on an eclectic assortment of applications spanning such topics as repair dispatch,

telephone switch programming, tax processing, and training for professional football players.

Rod has written more than a dozen books that have been translated into half a dozen different languages, and more than 200 magazine articles covering Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications, Delphi, and Java. He is currently a columnist for Hardcore Visual Basic.

Rod's popular website, VB Helper (http://www.vb-helper.com) receives several million hits per month and contains more than a thousand pages of tips, tricks,

and example code for Visual Basic programmers.