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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.
Sounds like an oxymoron to me.
100% Insightful
If you are using spreadsheets to do your accounting it sounds like maybe you still need to work on this "right tool for the job" thing (unless you've just written a fantastic double-entry system in VB for Excel).
And I can think of lots of reasons to write applications in Excel. The best one being that you probably already have it on your machine (no need to purchase a development environment). Another good one being that probably most of your users will have the "platform" to run your application. What else? How about an insanely good function library, including some amazing graphing tools?
I try to stay away from MS in general, but you can do a lot worse than developing in Excel.
But it's certainly possible to approach the range of things that Excel can do (which are substantial, especially when you use ODBC, etc., to patch into huge databases, etc) with a professional set of skills and business sensibilities.
A well-conceived Excel file can carry with it everything you need for a pretty elaborate bunch of data crunching and presentation, and that can hop from machine to machine very easily. Sales people in the field working up quotes, or managers chewing on inventory info before making a buying decision at a meeting - certainly they could just "use" a spreadsheet to do all of that, but having a purpose-specific UI sitting on top of it (without having to drag around other runtimes, etc) can really help when you're dealing with non-power-users.
"Professional level" can also refer to presentation sensibilities. For example, wise use of font families and graphs can make the tool's output more useful in a wider variety of settings. A pro knows how to wrap it all up in a smooth package, even if some of the logic is very simple. But a huge, complex, what-if business plan package friendly to investor-type users... that's a very cool type of app, with Excel running under the hood.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It gets real tiring listening to all the folks that couldn't say a nice word about a MS product if you paid them. Guess what folks... there are millions and millions of people that use Excel in very sophisticated ways. Why? Because it works well enough. With the help of this book, maybe it will work even better.
There are many ways to skin a cat. You haven't got a lock on God's One True Programming Language.
A lot of people don't realize that Excel is sometimes a political choice for software development.
The very fact that Excel is considered a desktop application allows departments to get away (not necessarily rightly so) with creating applications in Excel without having to go through as many approval channels.
The fact that Excel has an IDE that lets you do many of the things you can do in VB allows you to do sophisticated application programming that can slip under the nose of some bureaucrats.
I spent a couple of years doing Excel programming after doing "Enterprise" development. It paid the same as my previous work, and for my client, Excel was the platform of choice, simply because the development effort didn't require the involvement of the IT department and its associated red tape. Once I got accustomed to the fact that I could do anything that I could do in a normal development platform, I quickly got over the fact that I was doing Excel work. I used to snicker at the thought of doing Excel and Access work before. But business logic is business logic, so I guess it doesn't really matter what platform you're working on.
Obviously Excel isn't the programmer's first choice, but it is a capable platform. The business reasons for using Excel as a development platform may be misguided, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't use the same practices that you would use to write anything in any other dev platform. I would think that the goal of the reviewed book is to ensure that.
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."