John Walkenbach - Excel 2010 Power Programming with VBA

Excel 2010 Power Programming with VBA

by John Walkenbach

Excel 2010 Power Programming with VBA

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030-5774
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Copyright 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010923549

ISBN: 978-0-470-47535-5

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Author

John Walkenbach is author of more than 50 spreadsheet books and lives in southern Arizona. Visit his Web site: http://spreadsheetpagecom .

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Introduction

Welcome to Excel 2010 Power Programming with VBA . If your job involves developing Excel workbooks that others will use or if you simply want to get the most out of Excel you've come to the right place.

Topics Covered

This book focuses on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the programming language built into Excel (and other applications that make up Microsoft Office). More specifically, it will show you how to write programs that automate various tasks in Excel. This book covers everything from recording simple macros through creating sophisticated user-oriented applications and utilities.

This book does not cover Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). VSTO is a relatively new technology that uses Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual C#. VSTO can also be used to control Excel and other Microsoft Office applications.

What You Need to Know

This is not a book for beginning Excel users. If you have no experience with Excel, a better choice might be my Excel 2010 Bible, which provides comprehensive coverage of all the features of Excel. That book is meant for users of all levels.

To get the most out of this book, you should be a relatively experienced Excel user. I didn't spend much time writing basic how-to information. In fact, I assume that you know the following:

How to create workbooks, insert sheets, save files, and so on

How to navigate through a workbook

How to use the Excel Ribbon user interface

How to enter formulas

How to use Excel's worksheet functions

How to name cells and ranges

How to use basic Windows features, such as file management techniques and the Clipboard

If you don't know how to perform the preceding tasks, you could find some of this material over your head, so consider yourself warned. If you're an experienced spreadsheet user who hasn't used Excel 2010, Chapter 2 presents a brief overview of what this product offers.

What You Need to Have

To make the best use of this book, you need a copy of Excel 2010. Although most of the material also applies to Excel 2003 and later versions, I assume that you're using Excel 2010. Although Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 are radically different from their predecessors, the VBA environment hasn't changed at all. If you plan to develop applications that will be used in earlier versions of Excel, I strongly suggest that you don't use Excel 2010 for your development work. Rather, use the earliest version of Excel that the target audience will be using.