Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook

Preface

There are a number of books that include good introductions to programming Excel, but this is not one of them. I assume a couple of things about you: the first is that you’re already somewhat familiar with Excel and Visual Basic; the second is that you’ve got a programming problem to solve.

Excel 2003’s new features solve problems dealing with teamwork: collecting and sharing data, programming across applications, and maintaining security. In researching this book, I noticed that most of the newly published Excel books touch on these topics but don’t explore them in depth or put them in context. So that’s where I focus my efforts.

Each chapter is organized into a collection of labs, each of which addresses a specific programming problem. You can follow along in the text to complete the lab on your own, or you can jump ahead and use the samples I’ve built for you. Often one lab builds on another, so it’s a good idea to skim earlier sections if you are jumping ahead in a chapter.

I don’t expect this book will be your only resource, so I include a lot of references in each chapter. I’ve also included those references as hyperlinks in the sample workbooks (see the Resources sheet). Mostly those links deal with very specific issues related to the topic, but they also include links to toolkits and other software that may be required.

Don’t Force It

If you get stuck, there are a number of ways to resume your progress:

• Try turning on macro recording (Tools → Macros → Record a New Macro), perform the task in Excel, then turn off recording and examine the code that Excel generates.

• Search MSDN (http:// www.microsoft.com/msdn ) to see if Microsoft has addressed your problem.

• Search newsgroups (http:// groups.google.com/groups ) to see if someone else has solved your problem.

• And, of course, you can always check http:// www.oreilly.com/catalog/exceladn or http:// www.mstrainingkits.com to see if I’ve solved the problem!

If something still seems too difficult, examine your approach. In that situation, I generally go fishing and come back to the problem later. If you don’t live somewhere with good fishing, I guess you’re just stuck.