Excel® 2007 Power Programming with VBA

Chapter 2. Excel in a Nutshell

In This Chapter

In this chapter, I provide a broad overview of the major components of Excel 2007.

• An introduction to Excel’s object orientation

• A conceptual overview of Excel 2007, including a description of its major features

• A list of the new features in Excel 2007

• Some tips and techniques that even advanced users may find helpful

This chapter will prove especially useful for casual Excel users who may not have discovered all of the features available. However, even experienced Excel users still may discover a thing or two by skimming through this chapter. For more details on a particular feature, consult the Help system or do a Web search.

Thinking in Terms of Objects

When you are developing applications with Excel (especially when you are dabbling with Visual Basic for Applications — VBA), it’s helpful to think in terms of objects, or Excel elements that you can manipulate manually or via a macro. Here are some examples of Excel objects:

• The Excel application

• An Excel workbook

• A worksheet in a workbook

• A range or a table in a worksheet

• A ListBox control on a UserForm (a custom dialog box)

• A chart embedded in a worksheet

• A chart series on a chart

• A particular data point in a chart

You may notice that an object hierarchy exists here: The Excel object contains workbook objects, which contain worksheet objects, which contain range objects. This hierarchy comprises Excel’s object model. Excel has more than 200 classes of objects that you can control directly or by ...