Chapter 1. Introduction

About This Book

Microsoft Excel is much, much more than just a spreadsheet. Since the introduction of the Visual Basic Editor in Excel 97 and the improved stability of Excel 2000, it has become a respected development platform in its own right. Applications written using Excel are now often found alongside those written using Visual Basic, C++, Java, .NET and so on, as part of many corporations' core suite of business-critical applications. Indeed, Excel is often used for the client end of Web-based applications, made particularly easy with Excel 2003's XML import/export features.

Unfortunately, Excel is still all too often thought of as a hobbyist platform—that people develop spreadsheet-based applications in their spare ...

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