Slashdot Mirror
Professional Excel Development
The authors, Stephen Bullen, Rob Bovey, and John Green, show a level of sophistication well beyond the norm. They'd rather teach you the proper way to program instead of teaching you how to use Excel. In fact, the first thing they do is distinguish five different levels of usage: Excel users, Excel power users, VBA developers, Excel developers, and professional Excel developers. The book is written for the highest level, so expect a lot of depth.
Rather than simply show how to record a macro and reuse it, they start by talking about coding practices, naming conventions and application structure. That's followed by an entire chapter on worksheet design, including names, styles, validation, formatting and controls. After a chapter on add-ins, they launch into the topic of dictator applications, that is, applications that completely take over the Excel interface and look like a regular, non-Excel program.
The following chapters go into much more detail about wringing every ounce of functionality from Excel, and then turning to the operating system and Visual Basic for more help. After discussing data manipulation with databases, they talk about using XLLs and the C API, VB.NET, and writing Help files to complete the application. The entire structure of the book builds around a time-entry application that is developed from a simple spreadsheet to a full-blown, production quality program. A CD-ROM is also included with all of the source code and multiple examples that are scattered throughout the book.
Reading Professional Excel Development is not something to be taken lightly. The authors have done a fine job putting together a cohesive methodology for using Excel as an application development platform. I know of no other book that covers this platform in such depth. At times I found myself lost in the details, but I suspect a "professional Excel developer" (which I am not) would be delighted in the depth of description and copious examples provided.
I tried to relate a lot of what Stephen, Rob, and John discussed to OpenOffice Calc, to see if it could be ported to an open source environment. I was surprised by how much actually came across. Granted, items in OpenOffice are sometimes in different places, or named differently, than their counterparts in Excel, but most of the same functionality is there. Unfortunately, most of the examples are written in VBA, which doesn't translate cleanly into OpenOffice. Still, with perseverance, you would probably be able to develop most of what is described in the book.
Professional Excel Development is an extremely well-written book that covers the use of Excel to a depth few authors have dared to tread. The text gives you the tools to build applications that are much more than automated spreadsheets. Almost any program your imagination can devise can be created using the techniques given, which is a testimony to the power of Excel. Bash Microsoft if you want, but they do sometimes come up with a winner, and Professional Excel Development allows you to take full advantage of its capabilities.
You can purchase Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft Excel and VBA from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
My advice is to not build huge applications in Office unless you have absolutely up-to-date versions. There are certain points in Office 97 / 2000 where you get to a critical load area of your code and suddenly die. Function calls are in the help but don't quite work properly. Old products aren't supported. I'm buying this book because I need it, but building an app with older tools - something many office users are relegated to - is not that great an idea.
Note: this could all change in Office 2003.
My little site.
Heaven forbid any of the traders in the investment bank I work in get a hold of a copy of this. It's bad enough as it is trying to get them to move over to the manageable, scalable applications we build for them without encouraging them to build more spreadsheet solutions.
Powered by onion juice.
Yeah, God forbid you should bother to read all the way to the end of that sentence.
Excel is more portable than a Perl script in the sense that nobody (to a reasonable approximation of nobody) has Perl installed, or would know what to do with it if they had it. (Yes, I'm sure some way to generate freestanding, cross-platform Perl executables exists. I was about to tell flamers not to bother, but, come to think of it, I'd love to see a link.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This book is $32.99 on the Amazon site - save yourself $17 and get it there instead. Here's the link (no value add for myself)
https://comerford.net
Firstly, thanks for the review!
Lots of the comments here have been about whether or not it is 'right' to develop applications based around Excel. As one of the authors of this book, I think that misses the point. The simple fact is that in the real world, there are lots of people who do develop such applications and really need to know some techniques that can make their programs much more robust, maintainable, etc.
When teaching our children about the facts of life, we can lecture them about abstinence, let them know about lifestyle choices that might or might not be relevant, or we can teach them how to be prepared (physically and emotionally), safe, considerate and responsible. The latter is the attitude we've taken towards Excel development, while also teaching some advanced techniques that might help their activities.
FWIW, more information about the book and a few sample chapters are available from my web site at http://www.oaltd.co.uk/ProExcelDev.
When did Excel become a development environment?
It became a development environment in version 1.0.
Can I use Excel to compile my C++, Java and C# apps?
It sounds as though you're confused about what software development really is.
None of the Lisp or Scheme dev systems I use are capable of compiling your C++, Java, and C# apps. Likewise for my copy of Mathematica. Or the IBM mainframe I started out with or my current favorite Python/IDE combo. It sounds as though you don't realize that software development is a lot broader, with a much wider diversity of styles and tools, than your limited experience has acquainted you with.
Excel is analogous to a scripting language in some ways, with easy scripting of powerful built-in functionality but certain semantics are represented visually instead of textually.
It is also a functional programming platform that those with experience in functional programming immediately recognize and know how to exploit to great advantage. This is not an accident. Early spreadsheet engine designers were more familiar with functional paradigms than are most "C++, Java, and C#" programmers these days, so today's newbie programmers often don't even recognize the nature of the platform they're looking at.
Excel is not a "platform". Excel is an application that you can control through Automation.
Sure, sure. And Oracle isn't a platform, is it? Or Mathematica, or Matlab, etc. They're just big applications that you control through automation.
Ah, I can tell you have limited development experience with _real_ applications that don't use Excel or Access as a "back-end".
Oh, the irony is rich....
Of course Excel is a platform, and an excellent one for certain types of work. I've used it for sophisticated and flexible financial modeling, nuclear effects data analysis, and genealogical data organization, among other things.
I do agree with you about the quality of the built-in functions, though. I think the poster you were responding to may not realize how poorly implemented some of those built in functions are, from a numerical methods perspective. I tend to write my own implementations, using Excel primitives, instead of using Excel's fancier functions (e.g., random num generation, internal rate of return, etc.), and there are times when I'll prototype in Excel but end up doing the production implementation partially in C. The same can be said for Python, though. It doesn't mean that Excel and Python aren't real platforms.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."